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kodi.plugin.video.peertube
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kodi.plugin.video.peertube/contributing.md

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Contribution Guidelines

Thank you for deciding to contribute to this project :)
Please follow these guidelines when implementing your code.

[[TOC]]

Change workflow

The main branch contains the latest version of the code. This branch must be stable and working at any time. To ensure this CI pipelines are used.

The workflow is the following:

  1. create a branch on the main repository with an explicit name
  2. create a merge request from your branch against the main branch
  3. a pipeline is created each time you push commits in a merge request but it will not start automatically: the user may start it. Since a merge request cannot be merged until the associated pipeline passed, start the blocked pipeline associated with the latest commit in your merge request when your change is ready.
  4. if the pipeline passed, the merge request may be merged by one of the maintainers. Note that the preferred option is to squash commits.

More information about the pipeline is available in the CI file.

Design

Basically the add-on is composed of:

  • a service which will download the torrent videos in the background
  • classes which will retrieved information and play videos from a PeerTube instance

The add-on is based on the following python modules:

Name Description
main.py Entry point of the add-on.
service.py Service responsible for downloading torrent files in the background.
resources/lib/addon.py Handles the routing and the interaction between the other modules.
resources/lib/peertube.py Responsible for interacting with PeerTube.
resources/lib/kodi_utils.py Provides utility functions to interact easily with Kodi.

main.py

The file peertube.py is the entry point of the add-on.

This module must be as short as possible (15 effective lines of code maximum) to comply with Kodi add-on development best practices (checked by the Kodi add-on checker).

service.py

Note: the design of this module is still based on the alpha version.

It contains 2 classes:

  • PeertubeService: code of the service which is run by Kodi. It will instantiate PeertubeDownloader when the signal to start a download is received from addon.py
  • PeertubeDownloader: downloads torrent in an independent thread

This module should be as short as possible (15 effective lines of code maximum) to comply with Kodi add-on development best practices (checked by the Kodi add-on checker).

addon.py

This module contains the class PeerTubeAddon which is the main class of the add-on. It is responsible for calling the other modules and classes to provide the features of the add-on.

peertube.py

This file contains:

  • the class PeerTube which provides simple method to send REST APIs to a PeerTube instance
  • the function list_instances which lists the PeerTube instances from joinpeertube.org. The URL of the API used by this function and the structure of the response in case of errors is different than the other PeerTube APIs (which are sent to a specific instance) so it made sense to have it as a dedicated function. If more instance-related API are used in the future, a class could be created.

kodi_utils.py

This module contains the class KodiUtils which provides utility methods to the other modules so that the Kodi APIs can be called easily. It imports the xbmc file and the other modules should not import any xmbc file.

A global instance of the class KodiUtils which is called kodi is defined in this file so that it can be reused easily anywhere in the add-on by simply importing this module.

Some important features provided by this module:

  • The methods get_property and set_property allows to manage data which will remain available when the current call of the add-on ends. It can also be used to share information between the service and the rest of the add-on.
  • There are some helper functions which make the creation of items in Kodi UI easier.
    generate_item_info creates a dict with the required information to create an item: it allows to define only the parameters that are useful for a given items and the method will use a correct value for the other parameters.
    Then create_items_in_ui is called with the information generated by generate_item_info to actually create the items in the UI.

Coding style

Here are the rules to follow when modifying the code:

  • document the usage of functions following Sphinx format
  • use double quotes instead of single quotes when defining strings (to avoid escaping apostrophes which are common characters in English and other languages)
  • follow PEP 8 conventions. The compliance is checked in the quality job (more details are available in the CI file). Pylint can also be run locally with the following commands:
python3 -m pip install -r misc/python_requirements.txt
python3 -m pylint --rcfile=misc/pylint-rcfile.txt

Note: pylint is run with python3 to have latest features even though the add-on only supports Kodi v18 Leia (which uses python2)

How to release a new version of this add-on

These steps should be followed only by maintainers.

  1. Create a release branch whose name follows this format: release/<release_name>
  2. On this branch don't commit any new feature. Only commit changes related to the release process like:
    • a bump of the add-on version in addon.xml (note that the version numbering must follow the semantic versioning)
    • the update of the change log in the news tag in addon.xml (using Markdown syntax since it will be re-used automatically in the release notes)
  3. Merge the merge request (maintainers only)
  4. A new pipeline with the job create-release will be created: run the job manually since it should be blocked (maintainers only)
  5. The new release will be available on the releases page.

Translation

To translate the add-on you may:

  • update an existing translation → edit the corresponding strings.po file in the folder of resources/language/resource.language.<lang>
  • translate the add-on into a new language:
    • create a new strings.po file for your language in resources/language/resource.language.<lang>
    • translate the summary, description and disclaimer tags in the file addon.xml

More information about the translation system used by Kodi and its add-ons is available here.

While translating please take care to:

  • Keep the {}: they will be replaced by variables in the code
  • Keep the punctuation but adapt it to your language's rules (for instance the number of spaces around : varies from one language to another)
  • Translate using the meaning of the original string but try to not exceed too much the length of the original string (otherwise it may have a negative impact on the user experience e.g. with overlapping strings)
  • If you hesitate between several translations for a "technical" word, try to use the translation of this word from the Kodi interface

A CI job called translation is available in each merge request which contains changes in strings.po files. It checks that the reference strings in the translation files are the same as in the reference file (resources/language/resource.language.en_gb/strings.po).