A First Step Towards a Blender Add-on Repository
It’s hard to keep your Blender add-ons up to date as there’s no mechanism inside Blender to signal you when an update is available. By providing a Python library that can check for release tags on Github, Jonathan Williamson and Patrick W. Crawford take the first step to a solution.
Jonathan writes:
[…] the user has been left with various add-ons from many different sources that become ever more difficult to keep updated. For many users this results in ignoring any add-on that doens’t ship with Blender by default.
And so we set out to try and begin solving this problem. We are not building an add-on repository, but we have taken a first step by creating a solution for letting users update to the latest version (or revert to a prior version) right within Blender.
This is wonderful! I was thinking of coding an updater for Blender itself a while ago. It’s these small things that really move the feel of Blender from a DIY project to a professional grade application.
Thanks to the authors! We’re adding this to the RenderMan for Blender addon for the next release!
Great to hear it! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any troubles integrating or testing
Patrick
I have some thoughts. I’ll contact you through github. Really great code though! All addon authors should look at this.
Wonderful!