Where to start...
Quote:God, what a joke. And here I thought I could come here finding help. Nope, looks like we're all still pretty screwed.
As someone with 2 posts to your name, an opening like that is pretty much guaranteed to have no one offer help.
Quote:This is why the current repository for addons is a complete and utter failure. If we had an easier way for people to flag plugins as broken or outdated
This will be easier with the new repo site. As it stands, we are not mind readers, if no-one notifies a team-member that an addon is broken we won't know - a simple pm to one of us would take care of it. We don't use all addons so if no one tells us its broken, it will sit in the repo as is. Likewise a pm to the developer of the addon is the only way to get it fixed.
Quote:request the adoption of packages that have clearly been abandoned by their creators and former maintainers, these issues would be fixed in days, not months.
As you realise these are third-party user contributed addons - they are responsible for maintaining them, not us. Even if it is abandoned by the original author its unlikely we would take over maintaining it, the burden of it would be too great.
Quote:The devs would do well to take a look at the AUR for a much better example of how to properly set up a community-contributed repository.
Current addon system is far from perfect and we are the first to admit that and are improving it in a number of ways.
Quote:Blip.TV being screwed up for this long is making a mockery out of the open source development model. We could be doing much better than this. The tools and means to do so are out there and readily available, it's too bad no one seems all that interested and would rather have encyclopedic-length forum threads for "organizing" the discussion of a plugin's development.
Not really sure who this is aimed at. As you say the tools and the source code is available, so if the original author has dropped it no reason someone else couldn't fix it. From the looks of it, its simply not a popular addon and no one is interested.
Quote:I was thinking of teaching myself some XML and Python in order to fix some of these plugins, Blip.TV included, but with the way the current repository model is set up I'm worried it won't make one bit of a difference.
Well its not going to fix itself and that has nothing to do with the repo system.
Quote:How long must a plugin stagnate in disrepair before we presume its maintainer to be dead or missing, allowing someone else to take over?
If somethings broken, get in touch with the original author. If they don't reply after a couple of weeks, let them know your are forking it - real life gets in the way all to often whats a priority to you, doesn't mean its important to them.
Quote:This isn't just any plugin, it's a dependency of many others. It's IMPORTANT. Why hasn't it been fixed yet? I've seen patches for Windows bugs get released by Microsoft more quickly than a lot of XBMC's plugins, and that's saying quite a lot.
With respect, it can't be all that important or popular - its got less than 3 pages of comments and 6k views on this thread. That is not popular by any means - not sure what depends on it.
In summary, if its broke and you've not had any luck getting in touch with the original author to fix it, then you a SOL until you are someone else fixes it. You might not like it, but that is the reality - we are not going to maintain other peoples addons.