I’ll post in this topic, but I think this issue and lack of enough maintainer hours are related.
Letting the addon ecosystem be less managed is not without its downsides. There will certainly be awful, bug-ridden addons. There will probably be more overall instability as well for a typical user. It will create frustration for new users as it will take more time for them to learn and explore the openhab landscape.
A major development bottleneck is lack of enough maintainer man hours. I certainly understand the desire for wanting to solve things by increasing maintainer man hours, but that just doesn’t seem like a realistic goal. More like a nice dream.
With openhab’s addon framework it is easy in theory to pop in a development/forked jar file in place of the original, but I don’t find myself doing it. I see lots of interesting forks and development efforts, but the developers seldom post prepared jar files for users to experiment with. With a bit of time I can create these jar files on my own, but many users can not, and I would rather not have to.
Let’s create a development framework where I can point my openhab install at addon repos instead of providing it with addon jar files. This will allow my addons to autoupdate as the repos change. It will also allow users to easily experiment with development forks by pointing their openhab install at whatever forked repo they desire.
It will create a competitive addon ecosystem where we don’t need long term dedicated maintainers. If a maintainer flakes out, anyone else can just fork the repo and share their work quickly with any users who are interested. Let’s not make users have to set up a development environment to achieve this.
Of course, anyone who hates this can stick with the current architecture. If you want your openhab runtime to use the jar files you give it instead of pointing it at actively developed repos, that is your choice. Let’s make it easy for users to choose their desired balance of stability and new features. I like the idea of empowering users even if it makes things more difficult for newbies.