Re: EventGhost Plugin Installer Format

Pako · Post by **Pako** » Wed May 20, 2009 8:52 am

Bitmonster wrote:I will implement a kind of "EventGhost Plugin Installer Format", that will help users to install plugins that are not part of the basic installer. It will basically be a ZIP file with a special file extension, so EventGhost can handle the installation if the user opens it through EventGhost and everything can stay bundled in a single file (including DLLs and other stuff).
Plugin developers can then upload their plugins to the wiki. This way plugin developers won't need any special privileges to publish/update their plugins and have a basic version control system. The wiki will be extended to extract some informations from the uploaded plugins to generate an index of all plugins available. So users can search for plugins that might be interesting for them.
EventGhost possibly then also gets a function to find missing plugins if a configuration XML is opened and download them automatically to complete the setup (for example after a complete new install).
Once this is implemented, I will move many plugins out of the basic installer. Including many plugins that are written by me.

This is a very needed improvement. This system here has long been missing and I am already thinking that I wish to write to its introduction in the "Feature Requests". Very welcome to!

Will there also some statistics (how many times the plugin was downloaded, an overview of the most frequently downloaded plugins etc.) and the possibility of assignment stars (rating)?

I think it would be also necessary to establish even a system to store and then search different tricks, short scripts and other similar little things.

Pako

Bitmonster · Post by **Bitmonster** » Wed May 20, 2009 12:45 pm

Pako wrote:Will there also some statistics (how many times the plugin was downloaded, an overview of the most frequently downloaded plugins etc.) and the possibility of assignment stars (rating)?

Most likely not. I won't spend my free time to implement and maintain a full featured server framework, just for some plugins.

Pako wrote:I think it would be also necessary to establish even a system to store and then search different tricks, short scripts and other similar little things.

We already have it. It is called "the Wiki". But if no one uses it...

jsonnabend · Post by **jsonnabend** » Wed May 20, 2009 1:13 pm

BitMonster -

Your work on Eventghost has been fantastic. I think everyone who uses it is extremely grateful to you for your hard work. If you are going to slow down (or stop) your work on the program, I have two hopes.

First, it would be vital to continuing EG development that you spend some time putting together a detailed "how to" for getting EG up and running in some Python IDE (Wing, Eric, Pydev, whatever). That way, those who want to "run with the ball" could get EG fired up in a proper development environment. I have years of programming experience (I use Delphi to write apps for my own work and for my home theater as well), but I have yet to get EG running properly in a real Python IDE.

Second, rather than add new features, maybe you could spend whatever time you have left on the project fixing some of the bigger bugs. For example, the modifier key stickiness and unknown IR code (also discussed here) issues are significant.

Taking time to add what is essentially an "unzipper" doesn't seem that important (although I understand others might disagree with me).

Thanks for all your hard work, and for listening.

- Jeff

krambriw · Post by **krambriw** » Wed May 20, 2009 2:24 pm

I personally feel it would be much better if we could make Bitmonster get the feeling back instead. I do not know the reason behind his statement, it might be any, and maybe it is something I have done/said/indicated myself but without knowing this for sure

So, I do actually not want to "excuse for something I do not know about" but I believe Bitmonster would get strong support in what ever matter if he really wants that. And if I have made something wrong personally, let me know via pm, mail, phone whatever and I'm sure this can be sorted out

For me EG is a fantastic software and from the first day I got to know about it, it became much, much more than an extended remote for a VCR

I believe the rest of the community would agree

With very best regards, Walter

Livin · Post by **Livin** » Wed May 20, 2009 7:50 pm

I'm going to pile on here. I know my comments may not be considered valuable by Bitmonster but I do appreciate the work he has done.

I've said it many times before, EG can become something very good, to something very great.

It seems to me that the community here is crying out for more and willing to pitch in to help.

If Bit decides not to code for EG anymore I hope he allows others access to build upon the code and make it available to the masses. It should be a shame not to.

jsonnabend · Post by **jsonnabend** » Wed May 20, 2009 8:07 pm

Livin, the code is all there for the taking. Anyone can grab the code and start a parallel project. My problem is getting the whole shebang up and running in an IDE. I would love someone who's done that to post a walk-through. From there, Python is an easy enough language to code for someone (like me) coming from Delphi/Pascal.

- Jeff

stottle · Post by **stottle** » Fri May 22, 2009 4:50 pm

Jeff-

I was able, with a fair amount of trial and error, to get EG to run from source and build the executable/installer. I only went through the process once, so I can't write out step-by-step instructions. At some point, I may install on a different machine and make sure to write out the steps, but I'm not sure if/when that will happen.

Unless someone else wants to chime in, I'm happen to meet you half way - I'll post what I remember needed to do, you post problems/questions and I'll see what I can do to help. Deal?

What worked for me was to download the source from svn and try just running the command "python Build.py" from a command prompt in the EventGhost\tools directory. That script will tell you if any components are missing, as well as where to download from.

As I mentioned to you in another thread, a key is to install stackless python instead of the (non-stackless) default python installations. Stackless (I'm using 2.6.2) can be found here. Here's the installer I downloaded:
http://www.stackless.com/binaries/pytho ... ckless.msi

I tried the python easyinstall package, which was able to easily get some (like sphinx) but not all (doesn't work with gccxml) of the packages below.
You'll also need:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... p_id=78018 <-- pywin32 (interfaces for windows calls)
http://www.innosetup.com/isinfo.php <-- InnoSetup to build the installer
http://www.wxpython.org/ <-- wxpython is the gui library
http://www.py2exe.org/ <-- builds/bundles into an exe that doesn't require a full python installation
http://sourceforge.net/projects/comtypes/ <-- component object model interface (I think there's an interface in win32py as well?)
http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ <-- image library

Here are some that are needed for the full installer (BitM requires them even if you don't use them)
http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ <-- documentation generator
http://pysvn.tigris.org/ <-- svn access, requires the eg directory to use svn (i.e. tortoiseSVN) and be configured (I think)
http://www.dlitz.net/software/pycrypto/ <-- not used, but required code change to remove dependency

There's also a need for gccxml, which automates the generation of python code from c code. This was a pain to get working, I think I ended up using this installer.

Good luck, let me know if you have any problems.
Brett