bugman wrote in Tue Sep 06, 2016 11:15 pm: This sometimes results in lost advertising revenue, as the FlightGear user using FGMEMBERS will no longer need to visit the upstream website.
I have to say, I never really thought about that potential.
In the beginning I liked the concept of the "all in one location" that fgm tried to accomplish with aircraft. I didn't like having to search out all the different sources and wanted all aircraft available and in their most current state. That is a huge task.
As time marched on I discovered a couple things that made it less and less useful.
The first issue was my GUI shell just doesn't play nice with sub-module approach.
I don't like the free for all effect of branching any aircraft, even those that might have come from another source such as FGUK, or FGADDON, and making changes to them without insuring that they replace the original in the original repo. It is too confusing and not user friendly at all. Not to mention the disregard at best or disrespect at worst to the original repo owners. I find that I can't trust the work to be compatible with the original intent of the originator or with FG as a whole.
If FG did a really good job with their "other repo" list and made sure it was up to date and included as many third party repos as possible, it would basically accomplish the same thing.
I think a better approach for fgm would be to not branch "all" aircraft, but only those that are being modified. The rest of the collection should simply be a URL to the source code of the original. It would accomplish the same thing without disregarding or disrespecting the original authors. In fact it would be closer inline with the concepts of the internet site to site linking.
This should also include FGADDON, any aircraft in FGADDON that are still being updated and attended to on external repos should have a link to that repo. However it is somewhat different as the original or current maintainers of the FGADDON aircraft are mostly those external repo owners.
The negatives I point out with fgm may not seem like a big deal to some, but to me they are a deal breaker. It is too confusing, too risky that your not getting the original source but possibly some modified version that may or may not continue to be the intended quality or concepts of the original.
When I get the aircraft from the originating repo I know it is as intended. When I get the aircraft from FGADDON, I am confident it is with the approval of the originating repo.
I still maintain an fgm repo, mainly as a collectors tool, to help insure I have most or all the aircraft that are available, but unfortunately I haven't used any of them since its inception. What really is annoying to me is that I know there is a lot of work that has gone into some aircraft for events like USA Tour and other events. Also lots of work on individual aircraft that are mostly duplicates of FGADDON or other repos that is simply lost to me because I haven't followed all the work being done. It is too fragmented. While I don't doubt there may be ways to sort or look at the data of fgm, as a casual user of GIT I have no clue what that might be.
So in summary, for me fgm is a collectors tool that I practically never use with the hope that someday I may find something I need or want contained within the collection. It's day to day practical use for me has never materialized. My vision of what I thought it was and would do for me is far from the reality of what it has become.
EDIT:
Something else that made fgm appealing to me originally is I was opposed to splitting up aircraft from fgdata. I have done a complete reversal on that. I think it was a very smart thing to do. It makes perfect sense to me now. It was too much data mixed together and I like the separation. It just makes sense.
In fact I would like to see a method to allow for users to make their own catalog of any combination of aircraft from varying sources or from one giant repo. I think it would be so useful to have catalogs you could load like Boeing, Piper, Cessna or helos, tankers, airliners, twin engine, etc. You get the idea.