Official Visibility changes for preview packages in 2020.1

Also a good example of a package that could be hosted on github for community support.

 

Hi,
I just want to say, that this change is one of the worst decisions you guys made in quite some time. Not only is it just hiding a fundamental Problem with your Package Manager in General -> Discoverability.
Which despite your newsletters and blogposts etc should always be directly integrated into the engine. I've discovered some pretty interesting Packages in the Manager before which now ofc I cannot see anymore, because you guys decided you don't want new people to use them? I really don't get the reason behind this decision.

But another big problem with this new way of adding packages is that you always get the newest Version of any given Package when you add it via the Git URL. Seems fairly cool at first glance, but If you dig deeper it can be quite a for people who are newer to that whole workflow. I've recently discovered an Issue with the Unity Physics Preview and after some time of googling I've found out, that there seems to be a Bug in the Package itself and older versions may still work. So I've wanted to downgrade to another version to see if it fixes my problem. Sure enough, the downgrade didn't go through without issues and after the downgrade I have about 20 errors in the Unity Physics Package which I cannot fix. A clean install isn't possible with the Package Manager because it always installs the newest Version of the Package all over again and I have no control over which Package Version I want to install cleanly from scratch. There may be ways around this, and I do know some of them, but this is just bad design. Now I have to go into the Manifest.json myself and change stuff in it. Yes it is fairly easy but some people just don't feel comfortable with things like that.

All in all, this change is bad, and I want you to know it. Reading through this, it seems like I'm definitly not the only one to feel this way and I hope you guys will make changes very soon, because this is just a hassle and should never have happend.

PS: I also never understood why you guys wanted to get rid of the Asset Store in Engine. It worked fine and imo its just stupid that it isn't there anymore.

 

couldn't agree more. It is really questionable - why have multiple sources of truth? I've had to dig into the forums because suddenly I wasn't able to try VectorGraphics package. The obvious choice is to search in package manager settings, enabled preview packages and after fail - I've been really confused.

This is the root of all evil I mean - update & maintain the dependencies, manually check for the new version, project cluttered with asset store assets. Package Manager solves those problems, introducing better separation of user content vs 3rd party content. But - it introduces new problems that weren't present in the asset store embedded.

 

This is valuable information that should be labeled somewhere (either by labeling it as "experimental" like eventually suggested, or by adding some disclaimers in the documentation).

I'm also joining the crowd saying the Vector Graphics package is really cool !
(used it recently to test masking in UI Toolkit)

 

Well - the source is available and it doesn't require core support from internal APIs so that's fine with me. If there's a problem, we can fork it and fix it.

 

That's not forking as it's not on github.

 

GitHub didn't invent the term "forking". Anyway. Quibbling about terminology aside, my point still stands. For a package like this, it's utility doesn't depend on being maintained. Maybe the decent thing for Unity to do if they have given up on it is to relicense it? People would be more likely to step up if it was MIT or similar.