Mass Installer 0.3.1 [discontinued]

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old zeniko
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Post by old zeniko »

angelsong wrote:Where then would I upload the data from the text file to pull it into a fresh profile using Mass Installer?

If you want to upload it, you'll need some webspace or at least a website where you can upload single files (even some email providers offer you webspace nowadays, e.g. Yahoo!, and some forums allow single file uploads). If you can't do that and don't want to carry the file always with you, you can also simply list all URLs somewhere you can easily get access to (e.g. this forum) and copy&paste them all together into Mass Installer. In that case all URLs have to be on a single line, separated by space:

Code: Select all

http://www.path.to/extension.xpi http://www.path.to/another/extension.xpi ftp://ftp.and.so/on.xpi
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johnlgalt
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Post by johnlgalt »

Using the GMail tools to make GMail accessible as a local drive this could accomplish the best of both worlds - having the extensions loaded into a site accessible from anywhere (much like an FTP / Webspace) as well as being able to access them as a local install to simply "drag and drop" into the installer.

or will this break the MI coding or something else?

Theoretically it shouldn't....
old zeniko
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Post by old zeniko »

This should in fact work, as long as you are already logged into GMail when launching MI (on machines not having GMail Tools installed). I could at least successfully connect to a text file stored as email attachment in GMail. Should anybody want to try it out and not yet have a GMail address, just PM me your name and email address.

In general, MI can get anywhere your browser can get, as long as there doesn't have to be any further user intervention (like entering passwords).
dsmith
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Post by dsmith »

Is there any particular reason you can't incorporate the functionality that generates the xpi list in the first place into MI itself? In other words, why can't I install MI, and from MI's options dialog (or whatever) click a button to create the install file automatically?
old zeniko
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Post by old zeniko »

Of course, I could integrate this functionality into MI. The reasons that I still won't do it are that there is already an extension doing that job (InfoLister, so far the adapted version above, probably soon the official version) and that the job is actually almost impossible to get automatized completely, as many extension authors don't provide the required information for creating a complete list. Anyway, why would it make a difference whether you have to install MI or InfoLister for creating the list (note that you'll probably never use MI for that profile again, since the extensions are already installed)?
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angelsong
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Still trying....

Post by angelsong »

Ok, here's what I did: I collected all the install links to my favorite extensions (the actual html links, such as: http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/extfiref ... 39_enh.xpi and put them all into a Wordpad file, one link per line.

I then uploaded the file to a file upload site. I made a new profile, and installed Mass Installer, closed the profile and reopened it. I then input the address for the uploaded file into the command line for MI, and clicked the button to download and install the extensions from the file.

At one point, I did get a progress bar indicating extensions were being installed, then, at the end, an error message window opened. None of the extensions had installed to the new profile after all.

At another couple of points (separate install attempts), a window opened with the extensions listed, with the words "download error" or some other type of error message (I can't recall the exact wording). Again, no extensions were installed, with any of the attempts I made.

So, what am I missing? I tried to follow the instructions posted for the extension as I understand them, but it won't work...Help appreciated.
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johnlgalt
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Post by johnlgalt »

I did it a bit different - I tried it for TB, after doing a fresh install there - however, even though I had all the ones I wanted locally stored in a single directory, it broke - apparently there was an extension in there that did not like getting installed correctly.

Even worse, after I finished installing them by hand I found out that I had dupe entries in EM - that was pure fun....

Something that *just* occurred to me, I have since deleted the folder so I cannot verify, but I may in fact have been trying to install all of them *including* MI - but I can't be sure.

If I get a hold of another machine or get the gumption to create another profile I'll let you know how it goes - and if I can even tell you which extensions are breaking MI.
DMCrimson
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Post by DMCrimson »

So, no local mass install coming as of yet?
old zeniko
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Post by old zeniko »

DMCrimson wrote:So, no local mass install coming as of yet?

No, since this already is (resp. will be) available in Firefox itself. - Unless you mean having only the extensions list locally, which already is possible.

EDIT: As you can use the file:// protocol in the extensions list, local mass installing is actually possible - it's just not that useful, since the list itself won't be portable anymore (as you have to use absolute paths).
DMCrimson
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Post by DMCrimson »

hmm, good point with file:// , but no, on mac one can drag just one extension at time to install and the second link had no info whatsoever on installing multiple extensions at once. (other than copying them to certain locations in future)
old zeniko
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Post by old zeniko »

<a href="http://www.haslo.ch/zeniko/software/massinstaller.xpi">Mass Installer 0.1.6</a> fixes some minor bugs, restores compatibility with the trunk nightlies, adds a Polish locale and somewhat improves local mass installation for Mac users: you can now select multiple (XPI) files in the Find dialog and have them installed together without having to create a list file first.
DMCrimson
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Post by DMCrimson »

Guess what: Now I bow deeply in gratitude - this does just what it says! Many thanks from a delighted macuser. :lol:
Alan Beaman
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Joined: April 21st, 2005, 9:14 am

Absolute paths

Post by Alan Beaman »

My intention was to use Mass Install together with a backup of chosen extensions on a cd. Why can't I use a relative path if the xpi files are in the same directory as the text file?
old zeniko
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Re: Absolute paths

Post by old zeniko »

Alan Beaman wrote:My intention was to use Mass Install together with a backup of chosen extensions on a cd. Why can't I use a relative path if the xpi files are in the same directory as the text file?

The short answer is: because it wasn't written for this purpose.

The long answer is: I've been thinking about implementing this several times. So far, I haven't done it because of the following reasons:

* If I support the abbreviation of files in the same directory, people will expect full relative path support.
* If I support relative paths, people will expect them to work according to the rules of their operating system (so you'll want to use a backslash under Windows and a colon under Mac OS). This isn't that simple to implement under Mozilla.
* If I support native relative paths, people will also expect native absolute paths to work. These are sometimes quite difficult to distinguish from relative paths and / or from URLs.
* All of this would cause me already quite some headache (and work, which requires time I currently haven't got).

* If you've already gotten all your extensions locally, you could just as well drop them all together over the Extensions manager. This is the native way of doing a local mass installation for Firefox 1.0.x and works everywhere (except under Mac OS) - it should even take less time than having to install Mass Installer first and using that one.
* If you prefer doing it the Mass Installer way, you can already use it - even without the text file: just find the .xpi files on the CD (displaying "All files" in the Find dialog), select all of them and hit Open and OK. You can do this several times until you get an advantage by manually creating a text file.
* Firefox 1.1 and later should contain even better possibilities of doing local mass installation without needing a special extension first. This doesn't motivate me to further develop Mass Installer, either.

What Mass Installer is intended to do, does and does pretty well is downloading and installing extensions from online resources. Should you however think that you can offer me some good hints about how to solve the above mentioned problems and provide an extension which might be useful even when Firefox itself is improved, I will certainly listen to you and try to make the best out of your ideas.
Alan Beaman
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Joined: April 21st, 2005, 9:14 am

Re: Absolute paths

Post by Alan Beaman »

Hi!

My idea is that you already have a non-platform-specific way of finding the text file that lists the extensions to be installed, so how could it be that hard to automate getting the pathname to the text file and subsituting the filenames of the xpi files in place of the text filename for each? (Assuming they are in the same directory.)

If the "find file" dialog is not cross-platform, I don't know why you'd feel obligated to make this work cross-platform either.

It seems to me that most extensions hosted online at MozDev or wherever are located immediately under the same directory as the homepage of the extension; so if that's a rule, it wouldn't be hard to incorporate relative paths in another way to use with InfoLister (which I suppose someone has done).

The point is: a javascript to take (1) a given absolute path and (2) a number of subsequent relative paths and convert the relative pathnames to absolute shouldn't be all that hard to create.

None of this really answered my original question from a technical viewpoint, but I understand now how and why it would take some additional code in the extension to be able to do what I wanted. I am a total virgin when it comes to creating extensions. Maybe my thoughts will give you some inspiration anyway. All I can offer at the moment.

Thanks for Mass Installer regardless. Cheers.

P. S.

The file protocol for URIs should work exactly the same regardless the platform. So should using javascript to open xpi files with Firefox.

Thanks again.
Last edited by Alan Beaman on April 24th, 2005, 6:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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