Support addons hosted on git repositories

[Cephel]

It would be pretty nice if you could have it install and maintain an addon by installing it via its repository URL.

[AcidWeb]

QA nightmare. Git repos don't have standard structure plus most of them don't include required libraries.

[Cephel]

That's a user problem, not a support problem. By its nature, addons from a git repository would be more of a pro user thing.

[AcidWeb]

I will think how to implement it.

[kanegasi]

Adding to Cephel's thought, an option to add a github repository manually would be nice, but concerning general support, you could provide some sort of check an author could put in their repository that flags their addon on github as a "standard install". Many authors already use pkgmeta files and other markers for projects.

[AcidWeb]

I would argue if "standard install" even exist. Yes - there are some standards but they don't guarantee repository structure. And I think adding something that will detect it is out-of-scope for this project.

Considering that will be power user feature I'm rather thinking about approach where user set repo directories/symlinks manually and CurseBreaker just execute git pull.

I still think about it.

[kanegasi]

What I meant by "standard install" is that pulling the repo as-is would be exactly how the addon is supposed to be installed into Interface\AddOns, as in the repo has the necessary libs, folders, files, and .toc. The detect flag would put the responsibility of a correct install on the author and not CB.

In any case, I look forward to what you'll do with github support.

[AcidWeb]

I was thinking about using GitHub releases but it is somewhat messy and still have the same issue as cloning bare repo.

I will stick with my original idea to automate git pulls nothing more. It will be fully power-user feature.

[Cephel]

I would prefer if by default, CurseBreaker assumes the addon repository is directly hosted on the source tree, so the root folder has the .toc file and such, meaning you can check it out directly into the interface/addons folder.

Then, a flag should exist to specifiy subfolders within the repository, in case the repository root starts with a folder, ie. <repositiory>/addon/*.toc rather than <repository>/*.toc. The flag could look like this: install <git-url> --toc addon which would instruct it to look for the .toc file inside an addon folder in the repository root and checkout the folder appropriately.

Supporting these two use cases would make almost every addon hosted on git viable to be imported.

[AcidWeb]

This make sense but I rather implement something that will detect TOC and structure automatically.

[AcidWeb]

There is also third popular scenario. Two addons in repo - one TOC directly in root of repo and second in sub-directory. Quite common scenario if addon have separate options addon.

I'm starting to think that proper support of GitHub is not worth the time investment needed to implement that in civilized way.

[AcidWeb]

After long consideration I not found any way of supporting it in a way that I like.