Plugin & Library Repository (Tired of waiting for Fill)

Hello Everyone,

I am working on building a repository for bukkit plugins and libraries. I need everyones help. I have a script currently that is scraping the plugin forum posts, however because of the abiguity of the formats in the posts, I cannot parse a lot of items that would be needed to make this a really great thing for the community to use.

Proposed formats for everything have been floating around the irc chan for a couple of weeks now as I have been developing this project. I have a (mostly) working system as it sits right now and just have a few bugs left to squash before I can get most of the information into a proof-of-concept repo. I am developing everything in Python and JSON. The proposed specs below will hopefully allow for cleaner repository generation in the future and also allow for some things that I cannot parse, or cannot reliably parse, like bukkit build ranges, dependencies, and more reliable download links.

PROPOSED JSON REPOSITORY SPEC: http://pastebin.com/Wfgyfh43
PROPOSED PLUGIN FORUM POST SPEC: http://pastebin.com/mZkVQX7d
EXAMPLE PYTHON GENERATION CODE: http://pastebin.com/q7Xr0wBa
EXAMPLE HTML OUTPUT: http://chigeek.com/packages/plugins.html
EXAMPLE JSON OUTPUT: http://chigeek.com/packages/plugins.json

 

Looks Great! Although because I am a n00b to Python (just learned of its existence a few months ago) I don't really know how a plugin dev would incorporate this. I do like the list and links in one place, though.

 

The devs wouldn't have to do a thing. This would exist completely outside the plugins. Think of it as like a packaging system for the bukkit. All this will do is expose a JSON dictionary with all fo the available plugins and libraries with dependencies so that you know if you download iConomy for example, you would need the mysqldb library and Permissions as well. Also by providing direct links, a server manager (like what I'm working on) can download all of the plugins for you so that they are in a working default state.

 

That is freaking awesome.

 

Yeah, basically the proposed specs define the JSON dictionary and what would need to be done to the plugin forum posts in order to make all of the features of the repo work. I can parse out most things right now, but its a lot of guess work and potentially error prone. If your curious to see what would need to be done, then just check out the second link.

 

Parsing the forum to populate the list is a horribly inefficient and error-prone idea... Make a form for authors to submit plugins, possibly with a link to the forum thread to verify authenticity.

 

I agree, hence why I would prefer to have the JSON definitions populated by the developers. The current script is parsing the forum mostly due to lack of anything else. Need to get SOMETHING I am writing the needed code right now to degrade from JSON def to Forum Table to "legacy" scraping the forum. it's a stepping stone until I can get some help getting a site up for developers to populate the fields directly.

 

After a few weeks of coding in my free time and reshaping how to handle everything. bukget (formerly mcbm) it almost ready to accept plugin packages.

http://bukget.org/
https://github.com/SteveMcGrath/bukget