All entries for Tuesday 26 February 2008

Easier YMP Creation

Some people have requested a GUI for creating YMP (One Click Install) files (It seems some people have an aversion to XML) .This is something I had looked at in the past, but decided that it the resulting UI would be at least as complex as the generated XML.

I had another go at this today, and the resulting form really doesn’t seem to be much easier to use than writing the XML manually.

All you save is typing out the tags, which an XML editor would help you with anyway.

Perhaps a better approach for simple YMPs would be to convert user selections within the package management into a one click install file.

YaST software management (at least the Qt version) does provide a mechanism to export user selections to a file:

Which generates a file like

[Update]             MozillaSunbird                 |   21.0 M   | 0.7-6.3          | 0.7-6.3         
[Install]            MozillaSunbird-debuginfo       |    5.7 M   | 0.7-6.3          | ---             
[Install]            MozillaSunbird-translations    |   11.6 M   | 0.7-6.3          | ---             

It might be possible to convert this file into a YMP automatically, which would make generating simple YMPs easy. I might have a go at this sometime. However, it will not help creating complex YMPs with support for multiple distributions/versions, and translations.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for approaches to ease creation of YMP files for one click install links?

: 26 Feb 2008 21:14 |  Tags: Opensuse |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem