Simple Interface For Plugin Installation and Upgrade
Book page: Submitted by prescod on Mon, 2006-05-08 06:18. Last updated on Sun, 2007-11-25 07:46.
Simple Interface For Plugin Installation and Upgrade
Problem: Manual Installation Process
Installing a plugin takes two or three steps, depending upon the platform and installed software.- Unzip the plugin package
- Copy the generated directory into the “demo” or “plugins” folder
- Run the integrator task
This process is actually pretty error prone. Reported user mistakes include:
- creating a directory and then unzipping the package into it (resulting in an extra directory)
- running the integrator task in the wrong directory
Problem: Automated Installation Process
A software developer or system administrator wishes to make scripts that will automatically install a set of plugins. Today, this installation process necessarily depends upon the directory structure of the DITA Toolkit. This makes reorganizations of the toolkit potentially backwards incompatible.
Proposal
Given a properly configured DITA toolkit, installing a plugin should be a single step, likejava -jar lib/dost.jar /plugin:”c:\My Download Files\FrameMaker_adapter.zip”
No matter what the directory structure of future DITA toolkits, this command line will remain invariant and will copy the right files to the right places.
This implies a fixed structure for plugins. The proposed structure is as described below.