Upgrading from 2015 to 2016 has been a nuisance.
None of my plugins are there. The suggested solution was to look at plugins previously installed from Extension Warehouse. Since all my plugins don’t come from Extension Warehouse it was further suggested that I go to the SketchUcation plugin store. However, SketchUcation doesn’t automatically keep track of plugins downloaded. More importantly some of my plugins came from other sources than either of these two.
The appropriate place to keep track of plugins is within SketchUp itself. And when upgrading you should be given the option to 1) install, 2) not install, 3) update each of your plugins. I understand that plugins may not be compatible with the latest version of SketchUp, hence the option to not install (with a warning) or to update.
Does it install plugin that are on different websites? E.g. Extension warehouse, SketchUcation, Ruby Library Depot, and individual ruby guru’s websites?
No, only via Plugin Store installed plugins are tracked. But in combination with the tracked ones in the Extension warehouse most of the plugins should be coverd already?
Until such time as SketchUp establishes a standard and required way for extensions and plugins to record where they were downloaded from, at least some manual effort will continue to be needed each time you upgrade SketchUp. The EW and SketchUcation sites have their own systems, but the hundreds (thousands?) of extensions from vendor/developer sites don’t. There is no reasonable way for an automated updater to track all of them down.
I found that a number of plugins that I use are not on either Extension Warehouse or SketchUcation. So for me that didn’t work well at all. The upgrade process has been time consuming and a pain. If I had known beforehand how Trimble would handle this I could have planned better. It would still take time but considerably less than it has in fact taken me.
I think Trimble could do a better job. At minimum it wouldn’t be that hard to keep track of what plugins and what files associated with those plugins are actually being used by the current version of SU. Then SU could allow you the option of using them all again with the warning that they might be incompatible. It is in fact possible to do this manually, which is what I had to do with several plugins I frequently use.
Most software vendors provide a way to save settings and the like and automatically use them (optionally) when you upgrade to a new version.
With what I know now I will keep a list of the plugins I install and where I got them from.
Thinking: perhaps you could start with creating simple txt files named as the *.rb or *.rbs in the plugins folder. That file could contain links and other info to each plugin. At upgrade, just copy-paste the full plugins folder after reinstalling all the ones from EW and SketchUcation.?