Any plans for a Plugins repo?

Develop Developer Questions
1

Hi!

Package Managers are awesome, we all agree right? Krita should have one for plugins! It could make setups more reproducible and reliable.

Something I do to keep my workflow plugins with me is that I make a backup of the Resources directory where the /pykrita plugins are, which i already installed with the import plugin itself.

But it doesn’t address still having to scavenge various git repos to manually download and install the latest of those plugins.

Recently in Blender I happened to dug up the docs out of curiosity and I stumbled upon that Blender does has a package manager for extensions which is the equivalent of Krita plugins

it’s a CLI tool that you invoke by just putting

blender --command extension [-h] {server-generate,build,validate,list,sync,update,install,install-file,remove,repo-list,repo-add,repo-remove} …

So on Blender i just paste all the packages names (extensions) i want to install and helps my Blender setup turning more reproducible, so I feel this would be a great tool for professionals and even hobbyst can benefit greatly, I am a hobbyst myself after all.

Now this is possible thanks to Blender hosting it’s own repositories for extensions hosted at https://extensions.blender.org/

The idea is a simple CLI to get your plugins installed and/or updated in one fell swoop, something like

krita –-plugin {list,update,install,remove,search,repo...etc}

My question here is how feasable is for the Krita team to host a Plugin repo, could be possible to host it at the KDE infrastructure or would it require to be it’s own separate thing? And how feasible is for developers of existing plugins to publish and maintain their plugins on this repository, like will the already existings rules for the Import plugin could be easily translated to this?

2

There once was a central site for sharing Krita resources but it was a nightmare to maintain, moderate and keep free from spam so it was shut down and wasn’t used much by users anyway. I don’t know if there are any plans to bring it back. If you use the forum search you will find this question was asked multiple times in one way or another.

3

If there is some volunteer who is ready to do it I sure it will be welcomed. This website was also done in a similar way. Volunteers created the website and then it flourished

4

I’m ill-equipped for the task but I may spend some time learning the know-how to sustain and maintain repo. I don’t expect to be ready soon but I’d like to try, I always wanted to get seriously involved in the adoption of Krita!

Anyway sorry I wasn’t aware this was asked before, I just used low-hanging fruit search results in the forums like looking “package manager” and “repo” when I looked around before I committed to write

5

Here is one of many topics touching this idea already, some even have replies by the developers, like this one.

I even thought about spinning up a central resource server myself but the issue I faced wasn’t so much technical but mostly a legal one (like verifying authorship, handling licenses (possibly payment) and other legal difficulties that even depend on jurisdictions. Making the website is basically the easy part. Maintaining it and keeping it clean and legal is the bigger problem. Like it always is with user generated content, you have to meet certain requirements and can’t always simply weasel out with the “no warranty” clause of open source licenses. And that still doesn’t guarantee that people want to actually use it to share their stuff.

6

This is actually a pretty neat insight.

I think a marketplace can be incredibly healthy for the growth of the ecosystem, in fact I was seeing it like how there’s Superhive (Formely Blender Market) for buying and selling and then the Blender Extensions to be separate for just GPL and like extensions. Just as long as a market place and a open plugin repo stay separate.

Still tho I understand the maintenance burden that is legally keeping both repos sound. Itt really is a matter of more manpower to sustain.

7

Even for this website we tread with caution because or legal stuff. It is not easy, people often underestimate how much work is required to make something like this. Still if some one is willing to start people will come forward and join them.