a few suggestions:
is there no way to install 7-zip automatically? or is it a licensing issue?
you could save the last step if chaos toys would
have a dir structure similiar to addonpack/DX11 etc.
install to packs, not packs/p4v
i understand that the contributions so far don’t follow any conventions at all, but i think the most important thing is to reduce the number of manual steps a user has to make, otherwise i don’t see any advantage over installing those contributions by hand.
what about putting all this stuff into the root.v4p, so you would have access to the nodelist node and could patch some fancy algorithm which based on the installed contribution adds the right paths.
if the initial 7-zip issue could be solved too, the install instructions would be nothing more than:
hi, sorry but both shift keys are not working here … boh
i think there are no licensing issues, i can redistribute the 7z exe. unfortunately i couldn’t find a straightforward way to unzip a folder using vvvv, so by now i’m using ax external exe.
the idea is to have a registry that is a list of package name <- url so you can select with a combobox the package you want.
also, p4v follows vvvv naming conventions for folders, so a contribution that follow the module, plugins, effects convention coulod be added to the registry.
the advantage over the other approach is that it is written with a vvvv patch so a current user can improve it or mantain it.
hey elias, what about creating a CVAN (Comprehensive Vvvv Archive Network) :)
nooo, the shift keys still do not work, i copyed it from todo list in the
that’s all fine and good, but like alg said, why not considering nuget as the package format? it’s like a zip file, but has additional meta-information, like version, dependencies etc.
there’re some changes regarding our build system ahead (proper announcment will follow), which will contain a nuget package server. so far it will only publish packages for our core/plugin-interface projects, but as you can imagine this could be extended.
changing your patch to use nuget instead of zip shouldn’t be difficult. we could also define that all packages used for plugin development will need to be called PACKAGENAME-dev-VERSION.nupkg, and packages used for patching just PACKAGENAME-VERSION.nupkg - that way it should be easy to filter them properly. drawback of this solution is that someone will need to translate our existing contribution zip files to nuget packages.
@Elias the only one problem with Nuget server, that we need windows to host packages. Currently i’m using free server like MyGet, but it doesn’t allow large amount of space.
Nuget already have it’s naming model, why not use it? I also already wrote a pack command, that allow you to automatically create packages, that can be linked to the old zip files from Contributions.
@fibo can you try to integrate my NuGet wrapper into your patch approach, so you just create a GUI for all commands that it already have? Like install, pack etc, i can write a simple help for you, if needed.
@Elias, can we discuss the possibility of hosting our own NuGet server, of if we using the free one, we need to discuss if linking old files are good idea or not.
I have no problem on using nuget or whatever, but, my first goal is to do something really easy.
I think packages hosted on vvvv contributions are ok, we just need to tell users the follow vvvv folder structure convention documenten in nodes-and-paths, and add a registry file that can be editable easily.
I really don’ t want to overdesign or code something difficult to mantain, so I’m not planning to adding metadata, dependencies or even version by now.
I will keep it as minimal as possible, then if community likes it we can consider to add more features.
Some further thoughts:
It would be nice to add some auto deploy tools inside the solution.
both algs autopackager or a zip-target could be used.
Best would be of course a servvvvice from the devs to distribute the packs, where contributors can publish to a feed and where end users click to download in the shop.
