I've always seen the relative complexity (to joe-user) of installing applications on the empeg as a check on more widespread application usage. Why shouldn't anyone capable of installing and using JEmplode and hijack able to install tetris or pacman or GPSApp?

The largest difficulty in the past has been the complexity of configuring the start up scripts to get your applications to launch properly when the empeg boots. The preinit script was a great step forward (thanks bitt), but the installation was still fairly complex. Thankfully, Mark has greatly simplified this process with the addition of the ;@EXEC and ;@EXEC_ONCE config file lines to hijack.

Now as Tony said earlier, all that required to install a program is to "just copy the files anywhere to /drive0 and put the config.ini line in place and you're done."

Perhaps this entire thing isn't necessary, as it been recently pointed out that it is now really quite easy to install third-party applications using just an ftp tool, simple command line operations in linux like CHMOD, and some utility to modify the config.ini. But here's an interesting idea, and maybe it's just not worth the time over simply adding some entries to the FAQ over how to do an installation and explaining what each thing does.

Granted, it's not terribly hard. But why not automate even that, so that all that's required to install or upgrade a program is to download a standardized, pre-packaged installation file that JEmplode (or a simple standalone utility) knows how to put on the empeg? Uninstallation could then be as simple as scrolling through a list of installed software and clicking uninstall on the appropriate items.

Technically, such software is not very difficult to write, yet reduces the complexity of installation to someone who is not familiar with working with the internals of the empeg, and streamlines the installation process for those of us who are. I think this functionality would be great to have in JEmplode and hopefully would encourage more people to use third party software on their empegs.

To that end, I've toyed around with an idea that Mike Schrag mentioned almost a year ago. That is have JEmplode or some other such piece of software manage the third party software installation on an empeg. This way, once someone has JEmplode and Hijack working (both of which are well documented procedures), he or she need only to browse to the install file in JEmplode and it does the rest. JEmplode then automated the install asking the user a series of questions based upon the state of the empeg and the standardized manifest file listed in package. JEmplode also keeps track of all changes to the empeg thorough installs and upgrades, so that a well-behaved program can be easily be completely uninstalled through JEmplode.

The first step in creating such a system is creating a package format that and application programmer can set up the things JEmplode needs to know about installing, upgrading, and uninstalling the program. The package format would likely be a zip file containing the installation files and a manifest described below. (By using a zip file format, we reduce the bloat required in JEmplode as Java already handles the zip format, and zip compression is easily available on all platforms.)

I took the previous manifest format and greatly extended it to include what "seems like" all the necessary information JEmplode would need to manage the installed applications on the empeg. I tried pasting it in here, but the BBS butchers the readability. (Not that it was that high ) An example format of a manifest file to be included in an application package is now attached at the left.

So would this tool be worth implementing, or just a waste of time?

John