Setup this repo as a Unity Package

[nvandessel]

Hi! First off very excited to see this project on GitHub! Congrats on the release! It's very exciting to see contributions like this to the VR developer community, especially at this caliber. I have a small suggestion that I think could provide significant benefit to both maintainers and end-users of this framework.

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Problem Hypothesis:

Right now it seems like the repository is pulled straight from the Assets directory of a project and possibly maintained by tracking within the scope of that directory.

For end-users/developers, this makes it difficult to integrate the framework into their existing projects as it could conflict with existing file/folder structure and would involve a process of cloning the repository directly into their project (not recommended!) or possibly cloning and then copying the files into a sub-directory within the project (also not good as you've now lost Version Control!). Both of these are not ideal and have different issues surrounding them.

For maintainers and contributors, it provides a barrier of entry for a couple of reasons. They would either need to have 1) a dedicated empty project that is not in version control to contain this repo, or 2) possibly utilizing something like git submodules which has its own set of quirks. This makes meaningful open source contributions more difficult as there are additional layers of complexity to simply see your changes compile and test/validate they work.

Proposed Solution:

Restructure the repository to follow Unity Package hierarchy (defined here).

End users can then simply add this incredible framework to their project via the Unity Package Manager directly using a git URL or through a scoped registry. This is how the current Valve OpenXR Plugin is delivered and makes the import and setup a seamless experience. I would recommend checking out their Structure section from within the README to see their various delivery mechanisms.

For maintainers they can now have this repository sit outside of any existing project or repo, and add it as a local package into their project/s via the Unity Package Manager. Changes made to the framework will now be cleanly tracked and open source contributions through Pull Request will be a breeze!

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Look forward to exploring the framework more and seeing it grow!

[entromp]

Thank you for your detailed feedback.

I completely agree and hope we will switch to a package structure as soon as possible.
For visibility though, I would like to keep Asset Store door open as an alternate way to get the asset, since the user base is so large. I'm not sure there is a clean way to keep both in sync. Do you have any suggestions?

[nvandessel]

Definitely! Keeping the Asset Store door open makes perfect sense and I would highly recommend it - my assumption is you will have substantially more traffic through the Asset Store over the lifetime of the project. I'm fairly confident (like 99%) that the Asset Store accepts submissions with the same folder structure as the custom packages. I've seen other Asset Store packages do this, which is why I'm so confident.

My recommendation would be that seeing as you're one of few people publishing to the Asset Store, you maintain a similar setup to what I'm assuming you have now for maintaining both, where you have a dedicated project that contains the package within a sub-directory of Assets, and either select that directory as the root for upload or Export a .unitypackage and upload that to the Asset Store.

Hope that helps!

[nvandessel]

I've opened a PR: #16

[nvandessel]

Complete with #16 merged!

[nvandessel]

@entromp I don't seem to be able to close this discussion, archive or delete it, you might be able to though, so feel free to.