Help for Aimeos

I'm a bit confused about the Aimeos files. As I understand, the following happens, when installing Aimeos:

1. Composer downloads files to /vendor directory
2. Aimeos exports/copies files to the /ext directory
3. When we "php artisan vendor:publish", there are copies of files being made to the /public as well as to the /resources directory
4. When we create a custom extension, again, we copy files from /ext/ai... to /ext/custom-extension...

What is the purpose of the Aimeos files in /ext? Could these files not reside in the /vendor directory, as we are supposed to copy them in our custom-extension anyway when modifying?

Currently I have files like "aimeos.js" all over the place, which is a nightmare when upgrading. There doesn't seem to be a single source of truth.

The extensions are stored in the ./ext/ directory so Aimeos can find them automatically. This is a common practice for applications offering extensions.

"php artisan vendor:publish" copies the CSS/JS files to the public directory because they must be accessible to frontend request. These files in ./public/ are also the files that are used. All others are only copies because: The real storage in Aimeos is ./ext/ai-client-html/client/html/theme/ but Laravel requires packages to provide them in ./vendor/aimeos/aimeos-laravel/public/ so "php artisan vendor:publish" can copy them to ./public/packages/aimeos/shop/themes/

Thanks for clarifying, that makes sense.

Does this mean, we have to exclude /ext from version control? Like /vendor?

Yes, only custom extensions should be added to version control.

That helped a lot, thank you!