Hey Gaeel, supporting .love files is definitely something I've planned: https://github.com/itchio/itch/issues/135
I was wondering about the same two things, and here's what I think:
- There should be an open-source repository somewhere, with a list of dependencies itch knows how to install and people can depend on
- I don't feel great about putting binaries themselves in there, but their URLs could be listed there, hopefully from reliable hosts — we could even have our own caching proxy in-between to avoid putting unnecessary loads on their servers
- Basically, think http://brew.sh/ formulas
- In fact, itch already has a brew-like system — it's used to download 7-zip and butler
- ibrew could be made into something more generic to install any dependencies whenever they're required
- ibrew could support itch.io URLs and download them automatically (using the itch.io API to generate a GCS url), as well as plain old static files on an HTTP server — that would let people who want to host & update their runtime on itch.io do so, and yet support third-party tools that will never be hosted on itch.io (e.g. DirectX runtime, VC++ runtime, etc.)
- Since the client should always be optional, all ibrew formulas should have a human-readable description of how to install it, and we could use that to automatically generate instructions on the download page for non-client users.
So while we could rush love support in probably in a day, I'd rather have a whole system that works for every kind of dependency, and support everything at once!
edit: I accidentally a letter