[GIANT_CRAB]

I was thinking of making a registry for sourcemod plugins that will be licensed under AGPLv3.

What does the community think of this idea? Good or bad? And any suggestions?

[nosoop]

Not to be discouraging, but:

• Who would manage / work on the service? Software repositories have maintainers, after all.
• How would you be able to drive adoption?
• How would more complex plugins (groups of plugins, plugin dependencies, or plugins that interop with programs outside of SM) be handled? Would there be an install script written in some language?
• Plugin forks? In some cases, the maintainer isn't working on the plugin and someone else has written a fix.

From a previous discussion:

[4:56 AM] <psychonic> multiple people have not only suggested, but even started working on some sort of sm package repo [4:56 AM] <psychonic> all have failed [4:57 AM] <psychonic> it's a lot of effort, and for it to be worthwhile, you need plugin authors to buy in

It's a neat idea, but there's a bunch of hurdles that I don't think it's all that practical.

[GIANT_CRAB]

Hey nosoop,

Thanks for the insights.

> Who would manage / work on the service?

I would be running the service at gratis and of course, it would be even better if there were SM plugin folks that could contribute suggestions and code, etc.
The basic of idea of it would be to have a .json file with a certain structure (like npm or composer) and plugin folks can choose which registry to publish to, by default, it would publish to the registry which I'm running.

> How would you be able to drive adoption?

This would be an issue. I guess if the community see that its useful enough, then there would be some drive? Forgive me if I'm wrong.

> How would more complex plugins (groups of plugins, plugin dependencies, or plugins that interop with programs outside of SM) be handled?

Could you give an example of this please? I would like to take a look at these kind of plugins.

> it's a lot of effort, and for it to be worthwhile, you need plugin authors to buy in

Indeed, which is why I would like to seek ideas and suggestions. To understand better what kind of problems plugin authors face and work out potential solutions.

[nosoop]

Originally Posted by GIANT_CRAB > How would more complex plugins (groups of plugins, plugin dependencies, or plugins that interop with programs outside of SM) be handled? Could you give an example of this please? I would like to take a look at these kind of plugins.

Sure; one example that covers all three probably would be this Discord / Slack API, which has a dependency on SteamWorks, is split into a couple of modules for functionality, and requires configuration.

Anything that depends on TF2Items, ASteambot, or any of the various chat processors are also cases you can look into in terms of dependencies. SourceBans would be something that requires configuration outside of SourceMod.

If we decide to ignore those due to complexity (let's assume this is more or less a dumb unpacker without any dependency handling), the main problems I can think of are:

• Establishing a standard format for packages that developers can easily work with (something that unpacks directly into the game directory seems fine up until you have to deal with custom assets and want to avoid mangling existing files / cluttering the game dir)
• Handling uninstallation of plugins (one idea I've been floating for the past day is executing a plugin's declared OnPluginUninstall function so it can clean itself up)
• Determining access control for broken / unmaintained packages
• Moderating packages to ensure an author doesn't add anything malicious to their plugin
• What user interface would be provided for this -- not everyone has a GUI, or even a shell session to work with on their server

[Lubricant Jam]

Essentially, you're trying to make a gmodstore for sourcemod with automation? Or would this be a simple script to run alongside a server in which you select what plugins you desire?

[Powerlord]

I'll be honest, something that would be far more useful than a plugin registry would be a compiler tool that can download a plugin's dependencies.

Yes, I realize that I'm literally describing what Java's Maven program has been doing for 20 years.

[Arkarr]

Originally Posted by Powerlord I'll be honest, something that would be far more useful than a plugin registry would be a compiler tool that can download a plugin's dependencies. Yes, I realize that I'm literally describing what Java's Maven program has been doing for 20 years.

Sourcemod's Maven ?

[Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Powerlord I'll be honest, something that would be far more useful than a plugin registry would be a compiler tool that can download a plugin's dependencies. Yes, I realize that I'm literally describing what Java's Maven program has been doing for 20 years.

One thing I did notice from like the minecraft's realm of java/kotlin projects is every one and their mother had a maven repository, even if they only hosted one project to it.

I think the only real issue with most plugins is that they have weird includes and only use like a few things from it. I'm sure you could possibly create some kind of script or even a maven plugin that downloads these includes and contains the crap needed to compile the plugin without having to put it into your own include folder.

I'm sure if you can specify a file within a repo that explains the layout of your repo and the script etc registration for the plugin would be pretty easy. However most of that just seems like a more technical version of https://www.sourcemod.net/plugins.php