properly bundle pyffi for blender about blender_niftools_addon

[neomonkeus]

Packaging pyffi as a separate add-on will add another step for the user to do. I suppose it makes sense if the user is capable of installing the Blender nif part of the plug-in they will be capable of installing a Pyffi module first. But I do foresee lots of people looking for help because they do not install in the right order or not installing the Pyffi add-on at all.

Ideally I would have liked an all in one "plug-in" so packaging to the module folder would be my preferred option.

I will get onto campbo about the upgrade system.

( Also double relate imports "..xx.y" was the only way I could figure out to get some of the tests working, I know its not related to the actual end plug-in. You are right it does lead to incomprehensible imports and this is only simple one. Can we rename the sub /test folder to something else as I think that is the root cause. )

[neomonkeus]

I was talking to @kilon and @BlenderPhys over on #blenderpython and its seems that the add-on installer works as a simple copy paste solution. I will check it out myself later, but we may have to go back to the old way.

[neomonkeus]

There seems to be an overwrite option when you go to install the scripts, should investigate further. There are also some add-ons which allow you to install/upgrade suggested by @Gaia-Clary from #blenderpython, We could make an installer add-on and then use that to install all dependancies, but that might leave us back in the same situation on how to upgrade that, but it would only be single dependancy, delete it locally, reinstall, call imp...upgrade inception. Falling back to bdist_nsi might be still an option.

[neomonkeus]

Just thinking that having a niftools add-on manager might be advantageous as then I would have no objections to migrating each of the nif utilities to separate repos?

[amorilia]

I'm not terribly keen on introducing an addon just to handle installation, if we can avoid it.

Looking at the source of the blender install addon feature, indeed it (attempts?) to remove the existing addon folder, but probably it will fail at doing so (at least on 2.62) because os.rmdir is used which will only remove empty folders. Instead, shutil.rmtree ought to be used. Hopefully I missed something and I am wrong, but if I'm right, we probably can get this fixed upstream.

Regarding modules, here's another possible solution: introduce a io_scene_nif/modules folder ourselves, and add it to sys.path when io_scene_nif is imported? Personally, I hate to have to mess with sys.path, but... This will also ensure that old files get erased on upgrade (because the entire io_scene_nif folder gets wiped, or at least that's the idea).

[neomonkeus]

That looks good. I will still like to look into the add-on installer as a possibly alternative and for the wider scheme of things, i.e utilities etc. I am currently talking with Gaia-Clary, who has already given me the source code, so will find out more info. Here is general detail about it - http://blog.machinimatrix.org/products/marketplace/addon/overview/

[amorilia]

Well, it's certainly something we can revisit in the future. Anyway, this goes way beyond the "how do we bundle pyffi" question, so this issue can be closed?

[neomonkeus]

Yeah I have manually merged the last update that was omitted from the pull request.