Hi,
since my SoC proposal’s been rejected (I have got no problem with that) and since I don’t mind developping this out of a summer of code…
I propose to you that a Blender GUI + client interface framework be developped for Blender to connect to any online repository for any kind of Blender compatible content (materials, models, textures, images, scripts, nodes setups, logic bricks setup… basically, a lot of what you can see here ).
I am speaking about making a client for repositories, not a blender-specific repository for now. Though… if you’re keen on the latter, someone at opendesktop.org can* probably deploy a template site like that used by kde-apps.org or kde-look.org for you and you could customize that a bit for Blender for example.
- I’ve been proposed personnaly but declined. Ask me if you want to webmaster such a website or go to the ghns archive. See this.
Repositories generally are web pages which do not provide an API (such as SOAP and REST), but could and have a specific folder scheme to arrange contents. Hence the idea of an updater framework to which would be plugged small client scripts to wrap those different websites.
I know for now that there are repositories/websites up for : materials, models, and python scripts (at least here). And I know that there’s a Blender python client with a GUI for the former repository.
Would you want to take a look here for a more detailed design proposal and tell what you think of it ?
I should write a complementary document to list the classes’s various methods.
I’m ok to develop something on this way over time. But I’d be pleased to have someone accompanying me. Also there’s no project page and if you think I seem serious enough, there could be an entry on thisblender wiki page . It would just be nice to have a wiki… or maybe we could do the thing on http://code.google.com .
for a small to do list :
- make final decisions on a detailed (not like the one above) class diagram design :
- decide on the model design (ex : will we choose to see repositories as folders + files side by side and so recursively ?.. does the model permit search capability, tagging, marking… when repositories support those?)
- etc…
maybe we could have input from developers of project such as APT, yum on the diagram/design we’d plan to use.
- write and test : the RepoCore class + one RepoAccessToSomeWebsite client which can interface to the former
- write the GUI for that.
- write other RepoAccessToSomeWebsite clients.
- test & distribute. Have a central place for the script to fetch for repository addresses & to download their relative client engine to use if those are not yet installed.
To help with step 1. it would be nice, first to list all the blender repositories up worth writing a small client engine fitting the blender repository client interface to fetch/upload things from/to those websites. The various interesting data types could be listed as well. Note that if importers exist for some file type (for instance COLLADA), such files could be downloaded into Blender if they’re filtered through the importer, or just downloaded onto the hard drive. This makes that “foreign” repositories not necessarily blender-related could be used.
To help with step 3. GUI research can be done, for example by looking at the different solutions used in software we know. I’ve started taking screenshots here but I’m lazy for now to go further, edit, highlight what’s noticeable…
I think that this project is feasible with time and patience…
I’d be ok to work on that, though could people confirm that they’re ready to help ?