The package manager load is unreasonably slow for me: upwards of two minutes at perhaps half a mbps. “To download my plugin, click Tools->Package Manager, go get a cup of coffee, and when you get back scroll down to…” is not a great set of install instructions to provide tool users
There’s no progress bar.
If you close it and reopen it, it takes the same amount of time the second round.
There seem to be a lot of abandoned plugins.
Suggestions:
include the list as part of the Rhino install
do a differential check for the list when opening the window, not a full load (guessing about what’s going on, but from what I can observe it seems like a good guess)
periodically screen for dead links and notify the author then remove those tools or at least flag/group them separately so users can easily find the actively supported tools. There’s already a checkbox for “Include pre-releases” so adding one for obviously unmaintained plugins seems logical. Example: YachtNestingStructure- the food4rhino url in the package manager is a 404. (not trying to pick on that author, that’s why I suggested a notification before flagging/removal so they have a chance to fix it)
I’m not seeing that with my tests, but I only tested with the Rhino 8 beta and see a delay under 2 seconds. Are you seeing this delay in Rhino 6, 7, 8 or all of the above?
7 and 8 WIP/beta for the past few months, two different laptops and several different network connections.
The form for the package manager loads quickly, but the time I quote is the lag to make all of the plugins available: start scrolling and you hit the bottom in not very many plugins if you do it upon load.
It seems to load sequentially and completely for each plugin, so that if you have a plugin that doesn’t have an old phonebook style company name (“AAA MyPlugin”) then you can’t even tell it exists (search for or scroll to) until that part of the list loads, and there’ s no progress indicator so unless you’re experienced and know how to watch the scrollbar visible range indicator slowly shrink you have no idea whether the plugin is missing or the list is still loading.
