Monday, June 7, 2021

Add-On Updater Removed

 For some time the Daz Importer has used the Blender add-on updater from CGCookie to let users automatically update the add-on to new versions. However, there are some problems with this.

  1. The add-on updater is not my code and I don't feel comfortable to include code which I don't understand.
  2. The Daz Importer consists of python files (.py), JSON files (.json) and Daz Studio scripts (.dsa). Python and Daz Studio files are updated correctly, but JSON files are not. This could be because I didn't configure the add-on updater correctly, or because the updater uses JSON files internally and therefore treats them differently from other files. In any event some files were not updated correctly.
  3. Including the add-on updater is not strictly legal, since it is licensed under GPL and Daz Importer uses a more liberal BSD-type license. It would not be a big deal for me to change the Daz Importer License to GPL, but since the add-on is intended to work as a bridge between commercial and open-source software, I prefer a license that works nicely with both.
  4. It does not work with Blender 2.93.

The last problem was reported some time ago. Exactly what goes wrong is not clear to me, since my main computer cannot start Blender 2.93 due to some missing dll. But in view of the other problems with the add-on updater, I have decided to remove it completely now when Blender 2.93 is officially released. It has also been removed from the stable version 1.5.1.