I’m a very experienced C#/.NET developer, but my skills in C++ if not useless, then very rusty.

That’s the thing, most of the builds are stable enough, why not label them as night builds or beta and find a way to distribute them in an easier way, maybe integrated through XBMC – rather than having a few people doing night builds on their own and letting the users find the proper channels to get those builds. Why not have a single set of builds (ok except for Xbox for obvious legal reasons) and push them as they are, beta builds.

What I’m trying to say is that I see a lot of people making the efforts on their own and probably eventually giving up or not pushing in the same direction. Finding ways to integrate a second team or more to work on certain modules, while relying on the main team for technical guidance and feature approval I believe might speed up the process. The current way with a single team and a lot of other developers / contributors doing their thing on their own might not be the right thing, but maybe it’s just me…

Back to SVN Repo Installer, it’s a great tool, but I don’t think it might be the right tool – I wrote for example an plugin installer for XBMCZone.com (addons) and trying to do one for XBMCSVN.com (skins), I would see all that on the XBMC.org website with accounts from where people can upload stuff on the website, maybe having a team that reviews the content and a single installer that downloads all that approved / reviewed content.

I think you mentioned a few fair points and this is exactly why we need people to step up and get involved i.e. submit a patch for an update function for XBMC, or help Team XBMC build a better platform for plugins/scripts in order for the project to move forward.

XBMC is a hobby project and relies on individuals to step up and take initiative. Team XBMC will always be helpful and facilitating to these efforts.

Completely agreed regarding the addons – we want to do a lot of work in this area (and there has been quite a bit done) unfortunately the people that have been working on it have hit time constraints (after all, it is a hobby!) so it won’t be hitting the next stable. We do hope we can cleanup the svn repo installer to make it a little bit less intimidating for this release, however.

As for more stables, our idea currently is that we want to push more releases for sure, but they’ll necessarily be less stable. In particular, we want to push new development releases once major changes (skin, plugins, major new features) require an update to get the best out of the application. As I’m sure you know, most of our nightlies are actually reasonably stable, so once we have a new feature in and it’s tested, we’ll be in good shape to push out interim builds between the twice-yearly stables.

* an option to “ping” the website when XBMC is started and capture statistics like platform, version etc – this could give important information to the team as well as publish that on the website as well as maybe display somewhere in XBMC itself. That would create a better sense of community, most people don’t visit the website unless they have a problem.

* start an integrated installer for plugins, scripts and skins. Getting reviewed / high quality content (like you did with the skins section on the website) might get more people excited about it and more involved in the creation process.

An another thing, you need to release more stable versions, say every 4 months – they don’t have to be perfect, just stable enough to be promoted. An integrated updater would be a HUGE help, there’s a lot of people running older versions and never even bother to update and get new features. Those people will remain with the idea that XBMC is a stagnant process, nothing happens, so what’s the point in them getting involved?!