There has been some discussion about Magento Connect lately, so I wanted to help keep the momentum going with a suggestion of my own.
The current system that Magento uses isn’t horrible, but it isn’t great either. One thing I would like to see is some kind of integration with Github. Many of use use github to store our extensions because we like open source and enjoy providing them to the community. Honestly, keeping an extension updated on Magento Connect is a tedious process, especially if we already keep it all updated on Github.
One example of this is modman. It is an incredibly easy-to-use system, and it pulls all the needed files from github and installs them in the proper locations with a simple command. Through the use of the Github api, you could access the readme for the module description, see when it was last updated, see how many active issues there are, etc. Perhaps there could be a specific file that could be added to every repo that would tell Magento Connect the information it needed, similar to the way modman does it, but with additional information.
I think this would be great, and the goal ultimately would be for an extension writer to be able to add their github repo of their extension once, and then from there it’s just a matter of keeping the repo up-to-date, and all changes made to the repo master branch would update Magento Connect dynamically.
Supporter of the idea or have additional thoughts on this? I’d love to hear your comments.