Friday, July 17, 2009

XC Download

I’ve released an application called "XC Download Test". That is a test implementation of the agent who checks updates, downloads MODs and uploads those to your server. The agent will make it fun to build your site and keep it. But, things you can do with XC Download are very few, because it implements only a couple of features for test.

This agent application tries to download all items that an item you specified depends on. You may test the behaviour with test XML. When the application is launched, you get sample list from my homepage by clicking a button of the application window. Then, do double-click "cube_default" to download the theme. The application will begin to download Package_Legacy before theme download, because it tries to solve dependency. This is one of the most important features.

By this agent, there will be no need to discuss default organizations of packages that our project releases. Our project is software development project, but not distribution project. Therefore we should not use energy to keep other MODs that we don't develop. But, we often discuss what MODs to put the package in default.

I think that "simple is best" and "users have freedom to choose". But, the reason why the package is requested to contain default MODs is that it's difficult to get MODs for beginners.

We are developers. Our energy should be used for software development, not software collections. Therefore, we should solve the problem by software mechanics. Distributions are very great activity, but we should not do it. If we have to do something for distribution, it's writing code.

See cygwin. They don't have distribution packages , because they provides a powerful installer. It's easy to download favorite software. So nobody needs distribution package containing default software. Users have freedoms. That's very nice.

3 comments:

Deka87 said...

hi minahito,

sorry for posting it in this thread but it seems to be the only way i can reach you since "View my profile" link doesn't work. I can came to this blog from xoops peak and im a xoops user. So i recently came across plzXoo module which was just what i needed and it is the only q&a module i ever seen for xoops. so i saw that it was you who worked on it. the things is that i need to hack it a little bit (just add several additional lines in the question asking form) and i was wondering if you could do it if i paid for your work? i don't think it's gonna be tought for you cos i almost did it myself and it took me only half an hour but i had problems with adding dropdowns there and i thought you might do it better. please contact me -= simzikov at gmail dot com =- to let me know what you think about that. thanks in advance!

liv said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
liv said...

Hi,
Thanks for this article.The application is wonderful to use and to see many updates about the activities going on the server.

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