HOW-TO get your addon into the official repository

With the XBMC Dharma release we will have an integrated addon browser that will make it dead easy for users to find and install your plugin/script creations. So how do you get them in ?

First of all, read the corresponding wiki page. It contains all the info you need:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Off...Repository

A quick summary:

• Make sure your plugin is free, legal to distribute, open-source and contains a license file. No .pyo files or other binaries in our official repository !
• For ease of development for both yourself and other authors who want to submit patches (bugfixes or features), try to make a git or svn repository somewhere. Github or googlecode are good choices.
• Register with the official addon mailing list. This is the place to submit your work and also the place where other authors will contact you with pull requests for translations and patches. See the wiki page for more details and/or just watch the mailing list for a day or so, to get a feeling on how things work.
• Hack away !
  

I have started a wiki page for repository owners to list their unofficial repositories.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Uno...positories


However, if you have a good plugin that can be hosted in the main xbmc.org repository I encourage you to submit this as suggested in original post.

Clumsy Wrote:[LIST]
[*]Make sure your plugin is free, legal to distribute, open-source and contains a license file. No .pyo files or other binaries in our official repository !

Do I guess right that icon-file is a kind of binary ;-)

... no. binary in this context means compiled source code.

thebitjockey Wrote:I have started a wiki page for repository owners to list their unofficial repositories.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Uno...positories


However, if you have a good plugin that can be hosted in the main xbmc.org repository I encourage you to submit this as suggested in original post.

How about if XBMC pull from this wiki as well to find repositories ? This would be separate option like install from zip ..

It is our hope that an official "unofficial" repository (outside the US) will be up and running in the not-to-distant future which should eleviate the need for too many unofficial repositories floating about - the main repo unfortunately can't have rtmpe plugins in them thanks to the retarded laws of the US (XBMC being a US based foundation).

Cheers,
Jonathan

What can I do if I want to use external libraries that need .pyd or .so-files and are not available in the repo? I want to add support for .7z files and need "pylzma" and "hashlib" to do this.

Any way to use them and get the script in the repo?

@malte
script.module.mechanize
is this the kind of thing you're talking about?

my plugin required the mechanize python module, so i copied this design from the PIL module.
create one of these for each library you are talking about, and get them hosted in the repo.

then in your script's addon.xml, under the <requires> heading put the equivalent of this:
<import addon="script.module.mechanize" version="0.2.4"/>
for each external thing.

they get automatically downloaded when an addon requiring them is downloaded.

is this what you are referring to?

anarchintosh: Thanks for your answer! But I guess that will only work for modules that don't need to be available in a compiled version. I already do this with pyparsing and it works without a problem, but it is enough to have just the .py-file as a reference. Other modules like pysqlite or pylzma need to be available as .pyd or .so that are not allowed to be added to the repo. So I guess there must be another way (if any) to do this.

malte Wrote:anarchintosh: Thanks for your answer! But I guess that will only work for modules that don't need to be available in a compiled version. I already do this with pyparsing and it works without a problem, but it is enough to have just the .py-file as a reference. Other modules like pysqlite or pylzma need to be available as .pyd or .so that are not allowed to be added to the repo. So I guess there must be another way (if any) to do this.

You could post a trak ticket asking really nicely for it to be added to xbmc, like how pysqlite and pil are(during compiling)

If you can provide a method to build the module, it usually gets added quicker.

You can also provide the necessary script.module for users to download separately(be sure to offer all platform versions.) from a site like drop box(I did this while the pysqlite module was broken)