i am the author/maintainer of the Aloft nameplate addon (
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...o.php?id=10864).
some time back, my users asked if there was a way to slice Aloft up into a suite of separate addons that they could then selectively disable (and recover runtime memory in the process).
so, for the past 10 days or so, i have been trying to accomodate that. i am up to about 15 separate addons in the Aloft suite (the parent addon, and 14 children, each with its own specific job to do). it looks like i will end up with about 25-30 such addons by the time i am done.
now my users are complaining about "too many modules"
.
one of them suggested looking at BigWigs, claiming that it offered some sort of "after-market" mechanism for bundling "plugins" together into a single directory, or separating them into individual addons, at the user's discretion. but in looking at the most recent version of BigWigs, it looks like a plain old modular addon to me (several folders, one per addon, each with a TOC and LUA, the embeds bundled with the "parent", tied together with dependencies specified in the TOCs). no batch file tooling in sight.
as an alternative, i could offer each of my modules as a separately versioned/released artifact, but combined with the lack of a viable automated updater (WAU is dead, i am a Vista user and manual intervention is required for use of the WoWInterface updater, and the Curse updater has never worked for me), this could result in quite a burden on the user (worse than just a delete/copy/paste on a set of 30 folders).
i want to be able to manage a set of 30 very closely related addons, such that they can be released/distributed in a single archive, operated on as file-system artifacts as a group (even if some custom "batch file" tooling is required), but still allow the user to enable/disable them as separate WoW addons. i would like to be able to do this without having to get into binary installers and the like (i have always felt that that is what WAU and similar applications are for, but we don't seem to have a viable one of those available at the moment).
can anyone suggest a solution? some addon out there that has solved this problem?
thanks.