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.