From BlenderWiki

GSoC 2016 Preparation Results

This page documents my (Peter Cassetta's) progress and conclusions during the preparation stage of GSoC 2016.

A Blender Add-On Index

Sybren (my mentor) and I decided a single place for Blender to query for updates would be ideal. Borrowing some concepts from the Python Package Index (PyPI), the plan is to have a "Blender Add-On Index" where add-on authors must register their add-on and any versions they wish to be available from within Blender.

I've created a flowchart demonstrating what this process might look like for an add-on author.

Downloading Add-Ons within Blender

I discussed several options for downloading Blender add-ons natively with Sybren and Ton, as well as some others in IRC.

Downloading via Phabricator's HTML interface (https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BCA/) was ruled out. This is due to several things: the complexity of parsing HTML, the many unneeded requests this implementation would cause, and the server-side performance overhead that would result.

Any local git repository was also ruled out, because this would require far too much space locally, or each add-on would need a separate repo.

The ideas still under consideration are SVN or hosted .py and .zip files.

UI Changes

My thought as far as Blender UI changes is that the best place for an add-on updater is within the existing Add-ons tab of the User Preferences window. Ideally my project will simply incorporate new functionality into the Add-ons tab rather than radically restructuring it.

The exact changes to the Add-ons tab and what it will end up looking like are still up in the air.