PG should offer addons download

[bilderbuchi]

This idea I had came up during the latest devmeet:

Proposal

I think it would be great if the PG would in the future offer automated downloading of addons. This would lower the barrier for people getting addons they want/need. Additionally, it would take away/reduce the need/desire to include popular addons in the OF core repo and/or release download, if addons are so easy to get, as part of a workflow we already envision the users to follow in the future (i.e. the PG)

Behaviour as it is now/soon:

Alice has an idea for a new project. She needs a couple addons for realising her project, and knows which ones.
She opens a browser to go to ofxaddons.com and/or github to download the addons if she doesn't have them yet and places them into OF/addons/. Alice starts the PG. The PG knows about the addons, and allows her to select them for inclusion. She creates a project and starts coding.

Desired/envisioned behaviour:

Bob has an idea for a new project. He needs a couple addons for realising his project, and knows which ones.
Bob uses the new version of the PG to create a project. Beside the list of installed addons, the PG offers a dropdown list to select addons to download and place into the proper place. It lets Bob select if he prefers a plain download (to just use the addon), or a cloned git repo (to stay up-to-date and/or propose improvements to the addon author). Bob selects the desired addons to download, waits a while until PG reports that they're in place, and chooses all needed addons from the newly expanded list. He creates a project, and start coding the Next Big Thing, without even needing the browser! Awesome, right?

Analysis:

Although I realize that this is no trivial feature, I think much of what we need is already in place.
PG knows about the repo structure, which addons are already there, etc., and has most of the file-manipulation logic already I think.
ofxaddons.com maintains a list of available addons and their locations, so I hope it's rather easy to present this in some machine-readable way for PG consumption (@obviousjim, thoughts?).
Wget/curl/git could take care of the download.
ofxGUI would have to be extended with a dropdown list, or some other way of (space)efficiently presenting the huge list of addons available.

Possible issues:
Cross-platform way of downloading/git cloning without pulling to many dependencies (Elliot brought this up I think). Maybe have a fallback chain of mechanisms?
Addon structure may not comply to what is expected (for old addons e.g.), so the project wouldn't work in the beginning. The same issue would appear on manual download, though.

Thoughts and Feedback, please. :-)

[obviousjim]

hi christoph.

short answer is yes! that's the way it should be. Easily download and update local repos from github + ofxaddons.

This has definitely come up in many forms, and is on the ofxAddon road map -- we just need to get a few other features in place to support this.

Most importantly, and something that Greg has been actively working on recently, is to use Github issues API to report to ofxAddons which addons are functional and what platforms they work on.

[jvcleave]

I've always thought Homebrew's source file is admirably small

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/bin/brew

and the Formulas (addons) look fairly simple to write as well

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula

even though Homebrew is tailored for the Mac, being based on ruby it theoretically could run on multiple platforms.

Another thing I like about this is that others could write Formulas for addons they did not author themselves.

[kylemcdonald]

closing this in favor of @HalfdanJ's work on https://github.com/halfdanj/ofx

(hopefully the ofx concept can eventually be integrated with the project generator as well)

[bilderbuchi]

huh, btw, @HalfdanJ is your ofx the same as the earlier https://github.com/prusnak/ofx ? it doesn't seem from the commit history, and if not I guess it nicely shows how undescriptive names can be confusing...

[HalfdanJ]

@bilderbuchi It is not the same. I got inspired by it, but decided to rewrite it ground up to change some core design of it. I know its confusing with the naming.