Vs 5 Suggestion - Packaging, creation and sharing

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Caled
Posts: 403
Joined: Thu Apr 09, 2009 4:45 am

Vs 5 Suggestion - Packaging, creation and sharing

Post by Caled »

This isn't my idea (although I have my own opinions on it). OIther people have bandied it about on discord, but it isn't here and to me it makes sense as something to improve QOL for inexperienced new users, which is the theme of Mudlet 5 so, here goes.

A centralised package/module repository. Allow package creators to publish to it easily regardless of how/where they write their code. Allow people to rate packages and write comments. Lots of filters so players can find scripts to suit them quickly.

If a new, inexperienced player can locate a set of scripts for their mud, choose and install them from within mudlet, and receive notifications of updates/fixes, seems like the newbie experience will be a better one.

How many times have you looked at a thread for some script/system on your game's forum, and seen yet another method of delivering the package to the users, and yet another 13 pages of 'I installed it as you said but it won't work' questions, followed by people gently (or not so gently) explaining that they did something wrong in step 132 of the install instructions?

Or even 'does anyone have the most recent version of this script? The link in the original post has expired...

xanthia
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Joined: Wed Apr 10, 2019 10:51 am

Re: Vs 5 Suggestion - Packaging, creation and sharing

Post by xanthia »

Just like how something like an App Store made it suddenly so easy for the end-user to install more stuff on their plain vanilla devices. I can imagine it being no small feat though. Maybe slightly easier than APT is to Debian because the Mudlet packages tend to have less dependency? I can mostly think that dependency would be down to Mudlet client version.

Caled
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Joined: Thu Apr 09, 2009 4:45 am

Re: Vs 5 Suggestion - Packaging, creation and sharing

Post by Caled »

That's an interesting point.
I have a script which manages balance/cooldowns. One of the first scripts I ever wrote in fact, when mudlet was in beta. I rewrote it a few months ago, made it OOP, tidied it up etc, and added an optional flag during creation of a new cooldown object that would also cause it create a timer using demonnic's anitimer script.

I added a check - IF not demonnic.anitimer then display a warning and insert the command to the command line to download and install demonnics anitimer script from his github page.

Kind of a dependency management thing, albeit it situational and hackish.

Makes me wonder though, if I had a series of packages and one was my custom toolkit of helper functions, maybe being able to flag it as a dependancy for my other scripts is a good thing? But to be honest, I think that can be managed by the creators of each package, and doesn't need to be inherently part of this new package repo project. As the package is being installed, if the requirements are not detected, my own scripts could throw up a message telling the user to also install X and Y.

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Vadi
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Re: Vs 5 Suggestion - Packaging, creation and sharing

Post by Vadi »

I agree, this would be really good to have! It's a huge topic on its own worthy of it's own release focus I think, because it is a ton of work to create a package manager. Keneanung has started one one over at https://github.com/keneanung/MudletPackageManager if anyone would like to pitch in.

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demonnic
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Re: Vs 5 Suggestion - Packaging, creation and sharing

Post by demonnic »

I would very much like to be able to have muddler upload packages to a central repository.

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