[CONCEPT] Aggregate Unofficial Repository

I'm just saying, it would be nice

(would exclude adult repositories, for which there could possibly be a second aggregate)

There is now a tonne of repositories on the wiki, most containing only a handful of add-ons. It's inefficient to have to download them all and install from zip if your looking for cool add-ons.

Since add-ons (including repositories) addon.xml can contain multiple extension points, it would be feasible to create a repo file containing multiple repository extension points. This file could then be uploaded to the wiki page for people who want to check out all possible add-ons.

I'll look into making this aggregate repo, and a wiki page for how to add your repo to it for developers.

Yeah, this would be great

I think this is mostly a matter of study up on git. Possibly a few manual steps is needed, like checking out a local copy running a create addon.xml script.

tried creating a test. what seemed to happen was some messy metadata stuff, with the same repository showing up multiple times (depending on how many xbmc.addon.repository extension points were in the xml)

there now seem to be two options:
1) beg xbmc team to support a way to aggregate multiple repositories into one, as an 'Unofficial Add-ons' zip file.
2) use some kind of workaround, either through cloning peoples repositories regularly or a repository that hosts repository files.

before someone says 'Why don't you all just submit your addons to the same repository', i and many other add-on coders like the autonomy of owning our own repositories for our own addons, and not having to ask to be added as a committer to another repo. what is needed is to give users a way to access a unified 'Unofficial Addons' section, or many users will fail to discover brilliant add-ons like Hulu, iPlayer etc.

to sum up: Users like one place to get their add-ons, coders like dealing with their own repository.

I need to read up on this but,
you can only pull a complete git repository, not a sub folder? Meaning that if I want to submit an add-to the official repo I have to break up my repo and have one per add-on?

This is basically the same problem you are talking about?

I am not sure what other better options exists in git, but a workaround should be possible.
Do you use this script? https://github.com/vikjon0/qf-xbmc-addon...nerator.py

What happens if you modify it not to add other repository xml files? If nothing else works it must be possible to modify it to completly delete them.

I think it could be even simpler, an addon listing all the repositories (or even parsing the wiki page) and retrieving the repository.zip for each of them (eventually triggering the install, but that depend if XBMC provide the python API to do that). This addon being in the official repository.
So even thus if the install is not triggered automatically, the user would habe just to install from zip the downloaded repo.zip file.

I think that would make it easy to the end user. The only think to maintain being the list of the unofficial repo within this addon.
So no need to have someone merging all the repo, hunting for each new addon coming, at the time of the Installer Passion-XBMC I add to update on weekly (sometime daily) our FTP server with all the new script/plugin retrieved from other location and I can tell it is a lot of work and it is not realistic to do that.

i don't think that xbmc team will help you there, i've proposed to make an unofficial repo installer addon, that would list the unofficial repository and install those you want, they clearly answered that it wouldn't be include in the official repo.

anarchintosh Wrote:1) beg xbmc team to support a way to aggregate multiple repositories into one, as an 'Unofficial Add-ons' zip file.

I can create a patch with fix if xbmc team agrees too it !!

ppic Wrote:i don't think that xbmc team will help you there, i've proposed to make an unofficial repo installer addon, that would list the unofficial repository and install those you want, they clearly answered that it wouldn't be include in the official repo.

I think it is still a good idea, in the worst case scenario (meaning this addon wouldn't be added to the official repo), user would have to install this addon once and then would have access to alll the unofficial repo.

The issue here is more if XBMC provide or not a Python API for installing an addon in XBMC.
It would be possible to do it manually, but XBMC addon installer is doing a lot of more than just copying file to the right location (i.e check and download required modules), but I guess in this particular case it could work since it is only repository not a full addon.

Anyway, I made a qick test and it works as I expected.
If you want to create a master repo and you dont want to see the other repositores you just have to change the create script to:

Quote: if ( not os.path.isdir( addon ) or addon == ".git" or(addon[0:10] == "repository"\
and addon!= "repository.unofficalmaster.addons")): continue

EDIT: Well, provided that the name of your repo is repository.unofficalmaster.addons.