Yeah, maybe part of the .xsiaddon creation process should be putting
information in the addon that makes it immediately postable in netview. A
really cool thing would be if you could basically check out plugins from
NetView. So, your machine would maintain a list of all the plugins you have
checked out (meaning they're downloaded and installed on your machine), and
then it could automatically interface with NetView to check for updates and
such. Probably, this would be a button in the plugin manager or something.
Ideally, this design could be set up so that it's not just netview that
works this way. Your plugins would all have a url where they can check a
location online for updates. You can see how this would be great for
internal plugin distribution as well. We currently do something like this
for our workgroups, in that we check out a local copy of a workgroup stored
on the server, using SubVersion for revision control. What's cool about this
setup is that you could have XSI-specific compatibility information included
in the plugin header, so that your system could be smart about what upgrades
it does.
So, in summary, there would be a generic specification for how an XSI plugin
should be exposed on the web. XSI would be updated to provide features for
taking advantage of that specification. Netview and XSIBase would be ported
to the new spec.
Ideally, we could brainstorm for features the online plugin shares should
have. Like automatic bug tracking, feature requests, support for robust
mirroring on multiple sites without having things get out of sync, etc.
Just read Alan's post -- yes, automatic submission would be a start, but I'm
thinking go two steps further and a) beef it up with some more metadata and
b) allow it to be hosted on any url, not just netview. Of course, there
should be options in b) to tell netview to mirror the off-site post and/or
link to it.
- Andy
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