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spiff
Team-Kodi Member
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hi,
for those of you who want to have the skins available in the addon-browser in dharma; you can start submitting them on trac. i know the instructions aren't quite up to snuff yet, but by looking at how confluence does it, it shouldn't be hard to decode. key points;
1) icon.png
2) (optional) changelog.txt
3) addon.xml
4) (optional) fanart.jpg
5) death to skin.xml
we require open textures.
note that even though the repo backend is a git, it is not meant for development - i.e. you cannot host your skins there, only the releases will be hosted.
cheers
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Hitcher
Team-Kodi Member
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Cheers.
How does one go about hosting their own 'unofficial' skins?
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spiff
Team-Kodi Member
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have a look at addons/repository.xbmc.org
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If you wish to host your own repository (i.e. you host the .zip files of your skin and handle all the updating etc. yourself) then you need to provide:
1. The above XML file, obviously with links pointing to your http server.
2. The http server that serves said files - the checksum file is optional.
3. The files for the server (addons.xml, and your pre-built skin - see the datadir link above).
The alternative is to take advantage of the fact that we take care of the repository side for you. As long as your skin:
1. Works with Dharma without fault (as much as this is possible, ofcourse).
2. Has open textures so that we can build them for our mirrors.
3. Is hosted somewhere for development (i.e. in an SVN or git repository)
Then essentially all you do is send us a pull request and we pull it into our repo. This is particularly easy for us if you clone our git repo and do your development in that, but it's just as good if you have want to use your own git repo or svn or whatever. Whenever you update your skin and are happy that it is stable, you send us another pull request, we pull the changes into our repo and it's automatically built by the build bot, pushed out to our mirrors, and shows up for users to update.
eg Mediastream_Redux and PM3.HD are now developed on a separate SVN server, and Jezz_X tells us when it's ready to update and we take care of it from there.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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Ok, i'll take a peak at that, and thanks. We update almost daily, sometime's more, so i agree it would be a pain to notify every time. Sharpe has been doing a lot of stuff you requested to be FULLY compliant. Either Sharpe or I will look into that DialogTextViewer file (if he hasn't already done this.) as i'm not sure if you checked within a couple days, as that's when he's mostly done all the compliant changes.
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If you're updating daily, then your skin is still in active development and we definitely don't want all those updates. You need only notify us when you have things finished enough that you want to push an update out to users. These should ofcourse be as bug proof as you can make them.
We'll get a mailing list up and running over the next week or so as Jezz_X indicates so we can ensure we stay on top of things.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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Jezz_X
Team-XBMC Skinner
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Indeed the Addon repo is only for what you would consider "Stable" versions of your skin if people want to get every single update you make then they can use your svn still. What we want is more or less a final product that works with XBMC 10.5 you can of course continue to make updates in your svn but really we only want to pull another version when you have fixed major bugs or lots of little ones or added a few new things.
Its not meant for every single little change you make
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Sharpe
Skilled Skinner
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Yes that makes sense - it's a great new feature.
Oh and thanks for the heads-up re the DialogTextViewer.xml - I've put that in place now.
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2010-06-11, 03:11
(This post was last modified: 2010-06-11, 03:13 by djdafreund.)
Well, it HAS been very stable for years (as you both might already know), and the ONLY reason for update's is just for new idea's that come across (Sharpe is great with implementing new idea's) or maybe working off of what's there.
Kind of like the Confluence skin, as it's a pretty much final skin, but there will be little fixes as XBMC changes, and possible modification's to different sections as I notice from watching the svn daily.
As it sits now, it's pretty stable and has been, other then just implementing new idea's from the communities suggestions here and there. So i suppose we can just do a pull request when big changes happen. Nothing else at this point really needs to be added or changed and it great the way it is, other then maybe a few graphic images i was thinking of touching up, but the theme itself is finished.
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mcborzu
Skilled Skinner
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I'm no git/SVN expert but I remember from when I was following Alaska's development and if I modified Viewtype_Poster.xml and then tried a git pull I would get a "compatibility" error. Would users get that same type of error when updating if they have a modified .xml?
Or would you give some type of message "It seems a file has change would you like to overwrite"
Or would you guys consider that if someone knows how to mod then they the should also know about that type of stuff...
Check out Night - A Skin For XBMC
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If a user wants to modify a skin they have installed and don't want it overwritten by an update then the they have 2 options:
1. Rename the skin to something else (including it's id).
2. Bump the version of the skin to something much higher than what it is online.
There is no merging done within XBMC - if the version is higher, we overwrite with the new version.
Cheers,
Jonathan
