XBMC Addon Rollbacks
Today we’d like to feature a much less visible component of the upcoming Eden that is, nevertheless, something the team deems extremely important.
As a rule, we believe that a user’s install of XBMC is his or her own install of XBMC. That’s why you won’t be clicking through any terms of service or other contractual agreements when you install XBMC onto your system. That’s why XBMC is licensed under the GPL. That’s why virtually all development is done entirely in the open and source is invariably available well before an official release. The software is the community’s to do with as they please (so long as anything they do to the software and subsequently release is also made freely available, of course).
Perhaps more than anybody else, XBMC’s resident police officer of keeping things free is a dev who some call Arne, but most (around these parts) call Spiff. Spiff is one of the reasons why, back when the addon system was in development, revision data for each addon was mandatory, so that by the time Eden was rolled out, the Team would be able to announce Addon Rollbacks.
Put simply, just as we believe XBMC is yours, we believe addons are yours as well. Most people leave addon auto-updating enabled, to get the latest and greatest code. But auto-updating can be a double edged sword. What happens when an addon is updated and the user doesn’t like the update? With the program XBMC itself, the user could simply uninstall the most recent version and install an older copy. With addons, users were out of luck. Until now.
If you update to the latest version of Confluence and don’t like it, no problem. Rollback. If your copy of the tvdb scraper isn’t working as well as the last version, no problem. Rollback. The power is back in your hands.
Perhaps best of all, that means the power is just a little bit more out of our hands and the hands of the addon developer. Recently a certain hardware company who shall go nameless (but is a little fruity in nature) changed the rules for their “apps,” forcing certain other app authors to shoot out updates that did nothing but make their apps less useful by removing links to websites where users could buy more content.
If a user in that walled garden updated, either intentionally or by accident, they were stuck with the newly hobbled app with no way to go back. If, heaven forbid, XBMC ever went down a path in which a business decision resulted in hobbled addons, the users would already have the power in their hands to completely ignore our terrible mistakes.
Once again, as far as Eden features go, this is a relatively minor one. As far as open source development philosophies go, there are few more important.
Apologies for picking on Xeebo, which is a fabulous skin! Nevertheless, here you can see the relatively simple rollback button, ready to go.
cool, i’m getting really excited about eden!
Don’t apologise for Xeebo, it’s my default skin. It’s the best skin available for XBMC in my eyes.
Good to see such dedication on openness. Really looking forward to Eden.
this is why i like xbmc you are considerate to your users.
Was it intentionally to use a screenshot somewhat related to Boxee after the line: “As far as open source development philosophies go” ? :P
Anyways, great to see more news updates on xbmc, and thanks for keeping us all up to date :D
Question, will XBMC clean up the old archives either by option or automatically?
Some of the larger addons (100+MB) like skins grow pretty quick if they’re updated often. I recently cleaned up almost 2GB out of my userdata folder by simply deleting old archives for these.
Great! A very useful feature if an add-on should break! Thanks :) Is the rollback limited in any way (by e.g. XBMC keeping the n last versions that were downloaded)? Could I rollback an add-on more than once?
Great as always. This will come in handy. Looking forward to Eden
Is there a way to change the number of old addon downloads saved?
I used to use the nightlies for my favorite skin, but when I realized that it wasn’t deleted the old ones, the 100MB package being downloaded every night quickly filled my SSD, so I just flipped back to the default…
This feature completely slid under the radar! Very cool… Will you only be able to go 1 revision back, or will you be able to choose? Let’s say you use Xeebo and you have automatic updates on, and your away for the weekend. On Sat they do a major update, and on Sun a quick bug fix…. can you still go back to what you had on Fri?
Again a great piece of work…knowing that all devs put their heart and their soul in this project I want to thank all boys and girls who dedicate their spare-time to create this perfect media-center experience!
Thanks you so much for creating a software that fills my spare-time ;-)
cheers,
mm
I love the direction of this project. You guys truly get it and for that and a great product I just made a donation. Thank you!
Legen-i hate not being able to drink-dary! Getting a nerd-gasm waiting for eden!
@joel Nah. The only reason I picked Xeebo was because it was the only addon I currently had installed that had an actual rollback available. Turns out, using my dev-box for screenshots can occasionally be problematic!
Good. Then we have to stick with some repo rules I guess. Like zipped files. Keep old version packages keeping in repo download directory. I am started to use default repo structure. No more svn download. Just zipped add-on file.
I love what you guys doing, it’s just getting better. I would love to see an official xbmc box in the future (as boxee box) .
right now I am using appletv2 and I LOVE IT!:)
This is great!!
All we need now is the SAME ability with the whole XBMC install (the ability to backup the current version and rollback to it should the update fail or for whatever reason
@garret, unfortunately i didn’t find the time to finish that bit up before feature freeze hit us. https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/323
@meastp, the automagic thing is limited to whatever you have in your addons/packages. you can roll back and roll forward as many times as you see fit.
@spiff Nice! Thanks! :)
@spiff Nice! Thanks! :)
And this is one of the many reasons while I still feel XBMC is unsurpassed by any other comparable solution. Thank you Spiff! Thank you team!
I’m not sure if this is current or planned for Eden, but it would pretty much make xbmc complete for me. It would be awesome to be able to play music and control it, while the program is minimized, like some sort detachable windows (think of winamp when you double click it to make it a thin bar), other media players that have something like a popup when you hover over the system tray icon. Or an easy to use “external buttons” screen where you could map parts of your keyboard to control changing music…I know there are hax ways to do all of this, but having something like this built-in, would make it a great media player of choice, not for when you want to be showy with skins and fanart, but also for when you just want to listen to your playlist and get on with your computer work (and be able to change tracks without going into xbmc)….
Keep up the good work!
@Volkov
Personally, I wouldn’t want this in XBMC. I see where you’re coming from, but that’s really not the focus or purpose of XBMC. XBMC is designed to be used on a larger screen, with a 10-foot interface. It’s not really targeted towards desktop use.
What I do is use XBMC for my living room setup and anywhere I have a TV, but use other media playing software (currently iTunes in my case) on my desktop PC. This allows for the functionality you were talking about, whilst keeping XBMC purely dedicated to big-screen stuff.
Also, it’s trivial to have both pieces of software point to the same music library, so it’s not like you’d have to have duplicate files or anything.
AppleTV2 with XBMC @derk