About Third Party Add'Ons Support
Well... TweakScale (the Module) is pretty cooperative, but it's also dumb as a door by itself. It needs help in order to be able to do its job. This help is provided by patches.
However, as recent events had proven, bad patches can be a terrible thing. They should be maintained and curated with care. And this is where things can go trough the tubes as times goes by...
It's plain impossible for a single dude to keep track and update patches for every single Add'On out there. Even by accepting pull requests with the feature, these patches will need to be maintained on every release of the Add'On it supports! This thing can escalate fast, as every single time every Add'On supported by TweakScale is updated, I need to check the patches myself and then issue a new TweakScale release if anything changes. And this is terribly bad due a lot of reasons, between them:
- It's too much work. There're no time available for a single person to do it by itself - there're tons and tons of Add'Ons on the wild!
- Every Add'On update can trigger a TweakScale new issue, that then should be downloaded by every TweakScale user - be he/she using that Add'On or not!
- Some Add'Ons get deprecated or just vanish from the face of Kerbin, and yet TweakScale have their patches lingering - waiting to play havoc as things changes and that patches became obsolete.
- TweakScale became responsible for potential induced problems on Third Parties when any of the default patches misbehave, damaging TweakScale's reputation. With a third-party Add'On doing this job, any glitch would be rapidly pinpointed by installing/uninstalling that Complement, saving me the hassle of handling the fallout from TweakScale.
So TweakScale, in order to keep doing its good work safely and reliably, needs to go fitness: it needs to lose some fat.
This fitness process already begun. KAX patches were internalized into KAX, and are not being distributed anymore as default. These patches were moved to the Extras/Deprecated folder on the distribution file as is, they are not maintained anymore - bugs and improvements on them will be handled on the KAX's project (where some bug fixing was already carried out, by the way). I will provide all the necessary support on the process.
Since not all Add'On Authors will be willing to handle TweakScale patches themselves, some will linger on TweakScale 2.4.x series. But any Author willing to internalize them are welcome to do so - just, please, send me a note so I can move them out to the Deprecated and avoid stomping in your toes.
New support will be implemented ideally on Companion Packs (essentially, a patch-only Add'On as All Tweak!!) where support for one or more Add'Ons would be implemented, curated and maintained separately. This is one of the main goals of TweakScale 2.5.x series, where any patch not reclaimed by the Add'On's Author will be moved to a Compatibility Pack (obviously, owned by me) to keep things working.
TweakScale, from that point, will support directly only Stock and DLC parts.