RE: [XaraXtreme-dev] Re: ROX / XaraLX

["Neil Howe" <NeilH@xxxxxxxx>]

> [ Using Zero Install to run Xara ]
> 
> > The help is included as an archive in the autopackage and unpacked
at
> > install time because including the thousands of help files
separately
> > made autopackage run too slowly.
> 
> Interesting. Presumably you end up with the same number of files after
> installation, and autopackage still has to track all of them either
> way, so I wonder why this makes a difference.

No, autopackage doesn't track the individual help files now. There are
around 2500 files and autopackage just couldn't cope with registering
them all in it's own db in a reasonable time during the install. So now
we include them as an archive and autopackage just unpacks them at
install time but doesn't itself track the individual separate files. All
other files are installed and tracked normally by autopackage.

> 
> > And the tar archive is currently just
> > the same structure as the autopackage. There's no reason why it
needs to
> > be in the same structure so we can change that. Can you do this on
the
> > build server please Luke (that is, make the tar archive contain the
help
> > files unpacked)?
> 
> That would sort it out nicely. How do you locate the help files?
> (e.g., relative to the main binary location?)

Yes the program looks for the help files in ../share/xaralx/doc/en,
relative to the executable binary location. So once this change is done
you should find the tar archive is in the right structure.

> 
> If the documentation is on a different release schedule then it could
> even go in a separate package and be made a dependency (in which case
> it must be located using an environment variable).
> 
> > Does zeroinstall do anything about file type registration,
installation
> > into the application menu, icon registration, etc. like autopackage
> > does? Presumably not.
> 
> Correct :-) Well, it does typically get installed in the menu because
> you install by dragging the link somewhere rather than by clicking
> (e.g., if you're an Xfce user then you drag it to the panel's launcher
> dialog), but the package itself doesn't do anything.
> 
> Other config can be done at run-time (on a per-user basis), but we
> don't provide any special features to help with this (perhaps we
> should).
> 
> PS: On file types, it would probably make sense to add .xar to the
> upstream freedesktop.org MIME database. Whether my system can tell me
> what a file is shouldn't really depend on whether the required program
> is already installed.
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=shared-mime-info
> 
> (I'd commit it for you, but I'm no longer the maintainer of the MIME
> database)

I thought this was already done, but we'll look into it.

Neil