Support develop-branches / releases of 3rd-party modules

[looooo]

Would be nice to somehow support different version of 3rd-party modules. I guess this would be useful for:

1. 3rd-party modules dependent on specific versions of freecad. In this case the addon-manager should install a version of the 3rd-party module which works with the version of freecad.
2. Install and test specific features which are developed in a seperate branch (keeps master-branch stable, avoids backward incompatibilities.)

Idea came up in this issue:
looooo/freecad.gears#1

[sgrogan]

Interesting.
For 2, it seems possible to do manually.
I tested with the Gears WB that was install with the add-on manager using git-python.
I bashed into %appdata%/FreeCAD/Mod/FCGear
I was able to git checkout develop
I was also able to git checkout -b test
I changed the version in pygears/init.py, and after a FreeCAD re-start the change is picked up in the FreeCAD python console "print(pygears.version)"

I guess the challenge would be all the visual stuff so the user knows they are not at HEAD of master or on a branch (maybe also if the branch is local, not in upstream)

[chennes]

Part of this is on my radar (at least, adding support for multiple git branches/refs, and switching between them via the GUI). I probably can't easily support having multiple versions of the same WB installed at the same time, though.

[chennes]

See FreeCAD/FreeCAD#5498

[chennes]

I've merged that branch-switching PR -- I think that between the new package.xml metadata's ability to set FreeCAD version information, and the new ability to switch between branches, we've covered the main thrust of this feature request.