Poor Mans Package Manager - Basic or Advanced

[DisasterIncarna]

So I have recently been pondering over a nice simple way to abuse/use UHC-Tools again to give me the equivalent of a poor mans Package Manager, vaguely like some tools on linux such as Synaptic Package Manager.

I know how to achieve this reasonably well, for a quick example here is a picture showing the basic idea.



In the picture we can see i start with "AminetSearch AHI DRIVER/AUDIO" and a big old list of stuff is shown, i choose what i specifically want to see and search again for "AminetSearch m68k-amigaos-ahiusr.lha driver/audio retargetable audio, user's archive".

This is handy because when you search for the exact filename, category/path and description you get 1 result back because your search was so exact.

You can now do

"AminetReadme 0 >RAM:SearchResult.TXT"

now you have the readme for the only possible result and inside that readme is a very handy VERSION entry with a very useful Version Number which we can now scrape.

So what can be done here, well in my case i have a button to add a search result entry like the one above to a file, this contains the Filename/Path/Description/Version Number or files i choose to watch for updates, once added the Filename/Path/Description text are appended together and are used to narrow down the search like above to 1 possible result, the version number is scraped and that is also added and now Filename/path/Description/Version Number are saved.

Multiple entries can be added this way into the list, so now i have another button "Check for Updates", this just reads 1 line at a time all the entries, the same as above occurs, the saved Filename/Path/Description are sent as a search and the current ReadMe for it is saved to ram and the version number is checked, if the version number of the file extracted from the file in RAM: is different/higher than the one saved in the file of watched entries then what we have is a probable update.

We can now inform the user of an update, auto download the update somewhere, record the updated version number to your save file replacing the older version number and all is well in the world.

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The issue now is, i can leave it at that, the very very very basics, still useful imho and thats kind of where i am most comfortable leaving my work in progress new feature, however its not "quite" package manager level like you get on linux, so i am left wondering should i "KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid" or should i try and have it attempt to auto install something to the correct place(s) IF it can work it out, something like new library files/etc should be doable but i know i could potentially screw up somebodys manually kept setups which makes me lean back towards the simple/dumb solution.

It hasnt happened to me often but i do remember a few rogue Installer scripts that didnt have an expert level and it just straight up installed older stuff over my newer files, mostly library files and that is the kind of vibe i am getting from this if i go too far, esp when im no real expert on this kind of thing.

Image below shows the bottom listview containing files to watch for updates, still needs irevevant text removed but this is what im looking at currently, but as i mentioned above, is this "too" basic and not very useful or does it really need something more? maybe see if an install script exists and auto execute that and let it handle things?

I can easily see someone way better at this than me making something far better doing something similar but until that time i am inclining towards my "better than nothing" simple solution.