Sonic Core add-on repository

[w_ellis]

Hi,

Following on from Ben's post here: Topic 29823, I've been thinking about creating a nice system for maintaining repositories of add-ons for the Sonic Core system, i.e. Modular Patches, Devices, Modular Modules and Presets.

As a first step, I've created a github repository here: wellis/Sonic-Core, with an initial stab at a structure for this. It includes a _repo_index dir that contains some .nfo file examples, which serve to illustrate how I think this could lead to a searchable catalogue. N.B. The .nfo concept is stolen from XBMC, where it works really well in indexing the movie and tv content.

This repository could act as a central store for 3rd party add-ons, but it could also make sense that active developers maintain their own repositories in a similar layout, but with different access permissions, as mine is fully public.

I think the following could be created based on this:
- A desktop application (Java?) to allow searching and browsing of repository indexes and download of components
- A web application to allow people to look at what's available without downloading the desktop application

I'd welcome any thoughts on this idea and would be very interested to know if anyone would like to collaborate on getting it set up and creating the applications. Setting up a github account is free and (relatively!) straightforward. I recommend just grabbing the repository so far if you want to poke around, as it will be easier than clicking through the pages in github.

Feel free to contact me via PM, or reply here if you have any thoughts.

Thanks,
Will

[jksuperstar]

Exactly what I was hoping for, thanks for getting this started.

[Ben Walker]

It's certainly an interesting idea, and would be really useful for people reinstalling from scratch or coming to the platform fresh.

It would only be as good as the data in the repository, so it would take quite some effort to get the repository populated and tagged in the first place.

You'd probably have to get agreement for all 3rd party devs whose modules you were going to host.

I think that the Modular patch database I mentioned elsewhere can/should be run as a seperate project in the near future, at least until we actually have complete listing of modular patches AND the files to download, but I'm v. happy to contribute to the gitHub project where I can.

Ben