3 ms·

the semi-irony here is their source-project management site for addon developers is called "curseforge". I use curse mostly to handle addons for games I play a

by pfooti 10y ago

the semi-irony here is their source-project management site for addon developers is called "curseforge". I use curse mostly to handle addons for games I play a lot (world of warcraft primarily). Every now and then, when I bump into some terrible interface on their client or bad practice by their business managers, I have wondered how much work it would be to move to an open addon publication system. If you get all the addon authors to move to a different storage platform for their actual addons like github, how much extra work would it be to build a client on top of that? The addons themselves are pretty much FOSS by definition - you can't distribute for-pay addons for WoW at least. I imagine there'd be some scale issues, and github isn't really a distro network, but I'd bet the technical work could be done in a weekend.

larzang 10y ago
CKAN, the package manager for Kerbal Space Program mods, works by having a central metadata repo that they accept pull requests against for adding metadata for new mods, and then the mods themselves are hosted on Github or SpaceDock or wherever. It's not quite as automated as publishing a NPM or Composer package, but it's close and works well.
Lazare 10y ago
It's been many years now, but if memory serves... The precursor system to Curse was actually originally a shared SVN server a group of addon authors (called Wowace; still around somewhat) were using to collaborate on addon development. SVN checkouts were so convenient for distributing addons that the authors started using it to keep their own addons up to date, and then usage started to rapidly spread among "ordinary users". Unfortunately, the traffic every time a new patch came out absolutely smashed the server and generated enormous bandwidth bills. Various attempts to fund it via donations or sponsorship went nowhere. Curse had been knocking around in various forms for a while (I think they were a guild at one point, and already had a failed pivot to a "gaming community" behind them), but they rose to prominence by, basically, taking over the SVN server and finding ways to keep the lights on. Switching to github would be coming full circle in many ways. And it would have some advantages, but I'm not sure how happy github would be to act as a distribution network for addons. Note that 1.1 million clones and fetches in a week for the CocoaPods repo caused major strain: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basically-took-five-github-servers/#gref http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basica... Using github as the backend for a Curse-clone would probably exceed that handily.
- antidamage 10y ago
  Not that there's anything wrong with the Curse client from a user standpoint, but it might be worth someone's time to write a client that runs off of github. More open and all that.

by pfooti 10y ago

larzang 10y ago

CKAN, the package manager for Kerbal Space Program mods, works by having a central metadata repo that they accept pull requests against for adding metadata for new mods, and then the mods themselves are hosted on Github or SpaceDock or wherever. It's not quite as automated as publishing a NPM or Composer package, but it's close and works well.

Lazare 10y ago

It's been many years now, but if memory serves... The precursor system to Curse was actually originally a shared SVN server a group of addon authors (called Wowace; still around somewhat) were using to collaborate on addon development. SVN checkouts were so convenient for distributing addons that the authors started using it to keep their own addons up to date, and then usage started to rapidly spread among "ordinary users". Unfortunately, the traffic every time a new patch came out absolutely smashed the server and generated enormous bandwidth bills. Various attempts to fund it via donations or sponsorship went nowhere. Curse had been knocking around in various forms for a while (I think they were a guild at one point, and already had a failed pivot to a "gaming community" behind them), but they rose to prominence by, basically, taking over the SVN server and finding ways to keep the lights on. Switching to github would be coming full circle in many ways. And it would have some advantages, but I'm not sure how happy github would be to act as a distribution network for addons. Note that 1.1 million clones and fetches in a week for the CocoaPods repo caused major strain: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basically-took-five-github-servers/#gref http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basica... Using github as the backend for a Curse-clone would probably exceed that handily.

antidamage 10y ago
Not that there's anything wrong with the Curse client from a user standpoint, but it might be worth someone's time to write a client that runs off of github. More open and all that.