S&J wrote in Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:03 pm:Correction, it makes access to FGAddons planes more accessible, which lets face it was the point of it.
Previously a person downloaded a plane from the website and unzipped it into the planes folder.
The flightgear.org website's aircraft section used to linked to ibiblio.org central repo before the 1 click-download from the launcher e.g.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160223224 ... -aircraft/S&J wrote in Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:03 pm:As for other hangers, the proof of the puddings in the eating. There must therefore be a topic with a list of up to date alternative hangers on this forum, yes. I'm guessing it'd be 'stickied' to the top of the forum, easy to find, I've just not found it.
Only tiny fraction of people get to the forum - almost no one. Of those who do get this far - e.g. the vast majority are more computer literate Linux/Mac users going by the OS side bar for forum contributors (the impression I've got in the past).
The website aircraft section gets more views and is better than the forum, and these days there seems to be a 3rd party hangar section that links to the wiki which is a community resource:
https://www.flightgear.org/download/download-aircraft/(It's tricky to link directly to hangars from the official website without first making sure they aren't in violation of copyright - including things like having fictional craft from TV shows - but linking to something like a community edited wiki page for 3rd party hangars gives enough distance I guess).
I did add a link to the FGUK hangar at the top of the wiki heli page a little while ago, and update the description in the hangars page - but not having craft in a central repo massively decreases exposure as people make an assessment of FG based on what's included centrally and don't dig deeper if what they find at first view isn't interesting.
S&J wrote in Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:03 pm:But we must recognise that if a plane hasn't been updated for a year or two, by putting the plane into a 'pool' and allowing another person to come forward and maintain it.
People can already fork if there are collaboration issues, and take over if the maintainer isn't responsive.
By 'maintainer' the aspect you are mostly focusing on deciding approach and direction? The issues around that are mainly around helijah, and haven't got to the mailing list stage yet so FGAddon rules haven't come into play.
Usually maintainers are happy to review if they have time, and contributors are happy to have someone check/test their work - getting people to take over maintaining craft or other features is the hard bit. There's also the issue where if all of the work on the craft is by one person, then they are most qualified to review improvements (unless it's to an area they haven't really implemented in their craft, or the improvement goes significantly deeper than they did). There are also cases where a craft might be pretty detailed so there's less updates from someone after a while, or the maintainer might be away but have time to review work, or the maintainer might have been AFK for a while and returned recently.
Something that I've brought up IIRC in previous discussion on the mailinglist (or an issue tracker thread), is having collaboration details for aircraft visible from the launcher's browser - e.g. a button in the results next to the update/install button. Details would be things like development forums, issues trackers maintenance status, contact details, any development notes/standards etc. Tinkering is pretty much a core pillar of the UI for a non-commercial, opensource, sim.
S&J wrote in Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:22 pm: remember that the reason FGUK needs people like Helijah or Richard to add work to FGAddon is they have a lot of Windows users who find things like Git/Svn difficult, and collaborate by swapping zip files.
So maybe using a revision manager such as Git/SVN as the final point of FGAddon publication isn't the optimum approach.
Accessibility of the project and FG in general is a work in progress, and aircraft development related to Windows users is another topic - a lot of forum people and FG contributors are on Linux/Mac so maintainers can take computer skills for granted and be surprised or not pick up on work [
1]. In the case of FGUK they do video tutorials for most things on their channel, which is a good way for Windows users to learn. These days there are decent GUI clients on Windows for even svn and git (Git extensions seems pretty good), and probably a video tutorial with common operations needed for aircraft updates might go a long way to improve things.
Kind regards