Module Suggestion...

Ok I may be wrong, and there is a chance this is how its done, but I was looking at a module today and saw that the top of them holds some modinfo stuff, author etc. I guess this is then parsed into the help files?

Anyway,I know blitz has its own mod server, and the for the most part not all modules get in there ???

I was thinking, why not add an extra modupdate field to the top of the modules.

Say I make a module, I could then host a mod_ver.txt file. set its path in the module info, and set the path to the current download in the same modinfo. then the ide could check the version number in the mod_ver.txt file from my webhost, and download and update where needed..

I guess that's kinda what happens already but I am assuming that it only does this with BRl supported modules. so how about letting others do it as well ?? could make it easier for everyone to update all these 3rd party mods that are floating around and would be easy for you to add to the ide.

I don't think it's that hard to get stuff into pub or axe. There are all kinds of things in there already... maybe someone else who's more familiar with it can fill you in. Anyway, the IDE is open source (you have a copy of it in src/maxide and it is on SourceForge) so you can add this if you like.

The real problem would be unified hosting for those files, otherwise you'd have to add each third party's site to your mod server list, then sync modules to get their stuff when right now you just unzip or unzap the file and build it.

You also have to take into consideration the way syncmods works.
For each platform/architecture, you need a separate download area. Which would be four at the present time (Linux, Win32, Mac/PPC, Mac/X86).
It's a bit of a pain, I can tell you, having to do one version for each platform - and it only works by using that platform, so you need to have a machine set up for each.
Other than that minor issue, I think syncmods works great generally.

And if you built a module that was cross-platform, and only made it available for win32 users, that wouldn't be very useful - I'd need to then syncmods for it at work....- and vice versa.


Perhaps having your code in a subversion repository will be the way forward? Skid's IDE beta - http://blitzmax.com/Community/posts.php?topic=67538 - adds some basic subversion support (not that I've tried it yet).