Per-plugin userlists

[nephatrine]

I use a lot of my own patches and plugins that wouldn't make sense to include in the LOOT masterlist, but having to load up LOOT to adjust user rules and try and keep them in sync across different installations is a pain as is distributing them and having to explain what rules they need to manually add in LOOT's ui.

If I could just create a modname.yaml file alongside the plugin and have LOOT pick that up instead of having to manually keep editing userlist.yaml, that would be ideal.

Alternatively, if LOOT could parse an xEdit-style modname.modgroups file and infer load order from that it would also simplify things a great deal (at least for after: rules).

[Ortham]

I don't understand the relevance of your first paragraph: if you'd rather edit YAML, what's the difficulty of going through the LOOT UI got to do with anything? You can just edit the userlist.yaml? I feel like I'm missing something here.

Besides that, I've got some questions:

• What's the benefit in editing a bunch of modname.yaml files instead of editing one userlist.yaml file?
• I don't really understand what you mean by "keep them in sync", is that a case of copying the userlist.yaml around, or is it more granular? Wouldn't you have to also do the same keeping in sync with modname.yaml files?
• Is there any documentation anywhere about the contents of xEdit modname.modgroups files?

There are three potentially problematic areas that jump out at me:

• If a plugin has metadata in userlist.yaml and modname.yaml, how is that handled?
• What if you want to add a plugin to a user-defined group? At the moment everything's defined in one file, so the group definition has the same source as the user metadata adding the plugin to that group.
  • If you say that groups are still defined in userlist.yaml, then merge all the modname.yaml files down on top of it, that would be equivalent, but it may be a little awkward to check the userlist.yaml when editing a plugin's group in a modname.yaml
  • If you say that the group can be defined in modname.yaml, what if two such files define a group with the same name but different "load after" group lists? Is it treated as a conflicting definition error, do they get merged, does one override the other? If one overrides the other, how is the order decided. More importantly, how that decision communicated, since it's a loss of probably significant information?
• What happens when you edit user metadata in the LOOT UI?
  • For group definitions, if groups can be defined in modname.yaml, how does LOOT decide which modname.yaml files to add/overwrite the definition in?
  • For plugin metadata, does LOOT write to its userlist.yaml or to modname.yaml files?