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I absolutely love the idea about plugins since they blend in with all the skins realy nice, and i dont need to have some butt ugly old style gui showing up when i need to run addons.
However much i like plugins i have serious doubt's as to how much
they can ever become anything else than a feature for developers and geeks.
During the latest period i have tried alotta plugins and scripts with the result that only a handfull of all the scripts floating around seems to work, if i in addition remove the ones i had to "fix" searching these forums there is even fever who runs out of the box.
Offcourse one problem for alotta streaming scripts is offcourse that they will break often due to that the providers change theyr web pages and api's.
Another problem is that some scripts get released and then the author leaves the project and it's dead until someone else pick it up.
Trying to find out wich plugins that works on wich OS'es is a nightmare as it is now.
I don't mean to come to this forum just to nag about stuff not working but i would really like to think what team xbmc thinks for the future of plugins/addon scripts. Will it ever become a stable feature of xbmc ?
Atleast i bellive that there should be a "public" plugin/addon downloader that comes as default with xbmc. This downloader/installer should only install scritps that is tested to work on all plattforms. If this means like only 3 plugins then that is better then a large list of 50 plugins and only 3 really works.
And for those geeks amongst us who wants to they could configure this installer to also get scripts that is "untested". Much in the same way as we today use apt-get from different sources - stable or daily builds.
Basically: We need to have a SVN for 100% stable workings scripts.
Just my two cents...
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rwparris2
Team-XBMC Python Developer
Posts: 1,331
2009-06-15, 19:51
(This post was last modified: 2009-06-15, 22:49 by rwparris2.)
Are you volunteering to moderate this list of working addons? And not get bored of it in two weeks?
The problem stems from 1) no one wants to sit around testing plugins they don't use and 2) 90% of who complain about the plugin situation never bother to do bug reports (I don't know about you... haven't bothered to check).
Edit: Sorry if that is harsh but really a dedicated QA team of knowledgeable users is the only way to do handle this... that or automated testing, which would require a rewrite of everything that has been written already.
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blittan
Retired Team-Kodi Member
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There is a addons installer being worked on. And belive me I have given this long thoughts. And still I have no good solution to how we could maintain a list of working addons.
First option: As simple as it sounds, letting the user flag/report a non working addon from with either the addon or the installer. This would however give loads of false reports because of any of the following scenarios: user errors, wrong xbmc version, bad installation, network issues etc.
Second option: Have a group that test and approves addons on regular basis. This has been tested and there isn't anyone that has maintained such a list for a longer period than a couple of weeks.
I have tried to take some steps into easing this with the new installer.
There will be a manditory descriptive xml in it will be several helpful items:
- minor version of xbmc required to run the addon.
- what platforms it runs on (shouldn't need to be platform specific in general).
- contact info to the author.
- skinnable or not.
- translatable or not.
Also we are continiosly trying to improve xbmc's python to be more adjusted towards multiple platforms, one example being the new special:// paths.
If you have any constructive ideas or suggestion, I am more than willing to take those into consideration.
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w3__
Senior Member
Posts: 130
How about making the bug-reporting easy for people? In other words, what about some kind of thing that allows us to file reports from WITHIN XBMC? Or a simple "send bug report about this" menu item (on the top-level, where 'plugin settings' or 'set media type' would be seen in XBMC). If XBMC could have a 'debug' mode that can be entered into on a per-plugin basis without much fuss (automatically sending the log to the relevant people), you would have a far more significant flood of bug reports.
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Blittan addressed that above: The problem is false positives due to pebkac - obviously the new installer is being designed to prevent that.
Whether we have user-reporting of problems or not, we will still need a dedicated set of QA people to act on reports, in addition to a regular testing schedule.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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natethomas
Enjoying Retirement by Staying Busy
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Two additional suggestions. XBMC for Windows currently checks OpenGL version and pops up a warning stating when the version isn't high enough. Creating such a check for XBMC revision would solve a lot of the user error problems. I have no idea how easy that would be, but it would solve the revision issue. The pop up could say something like "Your version of XBMC is out of date. Please update to a more recent build or wait to use this plugin until the next stable release."
Plugin creators would want to be included in an add-ons installer would then be required to append some kind of minimum working revision number to the program code, which XBMC would then parse, check against its own revision number, and decide whether to issue a warning.
I am no programmer, have no idea how to do this, and am not offering to try, but it's an option.
Second, I'm willing to volunteer my time as a QA team member, if that is ever required. I guess that's not really a suggestion, but I like the idea of going down the route the Iphone and, before that, the Linux (Ubuntu?) installer, where there is a main repository of awesome apps that requires no additional legwork to install.
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So were you thinking like a context menu item for "Paste Debug Log"? Where it would sent to a site like pastebin and just give the user an address of the log?
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CrashX
Posting Freak
Posts: 1,165
2009-06-16, 05:41
(This post was last modified: 2009-06-16, 05:53 by CrashX.)
Blittan:
Is their going to be code change within xbmc to support descriptive xml ? I prefer that xbmc do this, then plugin themselves. Let the plugin developers worry about other stuff. Here are some more additions to list on the xml :
1) Country -> What country it works on ..
2) SVN Repositiory to get files from ...
I take it we are going to have the ability to install/remove plugins ?
I was thinking of having XBMC log something to the server when ever we get a plugin script error. After 100 times, the plugin becomes disabled until the author fixes the issue ..