re-releasing widgets under the same name

[very_bad_soldier]

It seems like it is becoming a habit to modify someone else's widgets and re-release under the same name but please dont do it since it causes lots of problems for various reasons.

Imagine someone releasing BA 8.09 with his personal tweaks under the official name...

Split from viewtopic.php?f=23&t=32950

[Floris]

That’s a problem that the widget-selector should handle in my opinion. Differentiating between game widgets and custom widgets.

Your comparisson with releasing new BA version is not very simillar with widget versions, but I get the point.

At first I was 'releasing' my widgets just in the BAR repo... but recently I unleased them at the forum. Because Bluestone didn't want my commits to the BAR repo I stopped doing that there. He probably didn’t liked some changes or that something wasn’t always working at all times. Since BAR is a work in progress I didn’t saw a problem with that.
I felt too restricted and criticized aswell so I stopped (as requested) committing to BA/R repo.

Renaming everything with a 'floris' prefix doesn't appeal to me. Changing to 'Lifebars' or 'Unitbars' even less, cause its basically still the same widget.

That said, I do not mean to hijack other people's widgets either... but my widgets are custom widgets... people got to install them themselves so it's their responsibility to know they have it installed.

[very_bad_soldier]

Distinguishing mod and user widgets is just one of several problems. You are just creating a big chaos doing it your way.
But whatever, take it or leave it... I dont care so much but I would go nuts if I were in charge of BA.

[Silentwings]

Split this out since I thought I should respond:

Badly written user widgets have been the #1 cause of bug reports to me for as long as I can remember. I could simply turn them off, but user widgets are a great way for people to get into developing stuff for Spring and I would rather encourage widget developers than suppress them. Some fantastic widgets have come about this way in the past (this one and Commands FX being examples).

I won't allow sub-standard code to be committed to the BA/BAR repository; having spent many hours fixing/cleaning in the past the code is nearly all in very good condition. Often I'd rather that widgets were developed & fixed by their authors to the point of maturity, and to see if they gain popularity, before potentially adding them.

So for the moment my approach is to try and give players who want user widgets better tools to manage them. The improvements to the widget selector & profiler in BA 8.08/8.09 should make it easier for people to identify user widgets that are causing them problems. They will also make my life easier - in future if I suspect a broken user widget I can simply ask people to click the "disable user widgets" button on the (new) widget selector and see if the problem still occurs.

[smoth]

<3 you for that bro

[zoggop]

i did this to Export Heightmap, but because the old version didn't even work with this engine version, and it does something that almost nobody needs, that seemed fine

[PicassoCT]

Split this out since I thought I should respond:

Badly written user widgets have been the #1 cause of bug reports to me for as long as I can remember. I could simply turn them off, but user widgets are a great way for people to get into developing stuff for Spring and I would rather encourage widget developers than suppress them. Some fantastic widgets have come about this way in the past (this one and Commands FX being examples).

I won't allow sub-standard code to be committed to the BA/BAR repository; having spent many hours fixing/cleaning in the past the code is nearly all in very good condition. Often I'd rather that widgets were developed & fixed by their authors to the point of maturity, and to see if they gain popularity, before potentially adding them.

So for the moment my approach is to try and give players who want user widgets better tools to manage them. The improvements to the widget selector & profiler in BA 8.08/8.09 should make it easier for people to identify user widgets that are causing them problems. They will also make my life easier - in future if I suspect a broken user widget I can simply ask people to click the "disable user widgets" button on the (new) widget selector and see if the problem still occurs.

To be honest, when reading this- i expected some fancy this "widget has been reported broken and thus deactivated-you can reactivate it manually" powertool.