Custom Installer like jQueryUI

[sharpdressedcodes]

Have you ever thought about making a custom install like http://jqueryui.com/download/ ? Like I mean, being able to come to a web page, click on downloads, then be presented with all the NOOBS operating systems, which then the user can select which ones to combine into a package, and then download that package.

This way many more operating systems can be added, and it is up to the user to choose which ones they want. You could always have a standard or default one for people who just wanna "get it working".

I would be glad to help out.

[lurch]

Funnily enough, that's something I had thought about :)
But it's a longer-term goal, and something I was going to look at once more OSes are available within NOOBS.
Custom-NOOBS-zipfiles will obviously be much bigger than custom-jQuery-zipfiles, and thus impossible to build 'dynamically', so I was thinking about pre-generating zipfiles for all possible combinations (as long as this doesn't end up using too much server disk-space!). So depending upon which OSes the user selects, would determine which pre-generated zipfile they get a download link for (with, like you say, probably a 'recommended selection' or two).

[maxnet]

ZIP has its metadata at the end of the file, and it is technically quite possible to generate large .zip files dynamically on-demand with PHP (google: zipstream php)
As long as it is hosted on webserver software that executes PHP scripts in a blocking manner such as Apache, as opposed to software that attempts to execute scripts as fast as possible and buffers all output infinitely to memory (lighttpd and nginx do that, and you run out of memory fast when working with large files)

[lurch]

Interesting info, thanks @maxnet !
Not sure I'd be entirely happy trusting code that hasn't been updated in 5 years though (I'm not a PHP programmer, so wouldn't be able to determine if it has any security flaws). And because of the complex way the downloads are served from a mixture of a CDN and load-balancers (http://www.raspberrypi.org/coping-with-christmas-a-guest-post-from-our-web-hosts-at-mythic-beasts/), I'm not sure if it's even possible to use dynamic content. But it's certainly an option I'll investigate whenever I do get round to looking at this in more detail.

[sharpdressedcodes]

@maxnet thanks for the advice, I didn't know that was even possible. @lurch I just updated a zipstream repo and have made a pull request: Grandt/PHPZip#30
I can also make a test webpage to test this theory whenever you are ready.

[maxnet]

Different zipstream than I had in mind.
The add_large_file() method of this one doesn't use temp files: https://github.com/maennchen/ZipStream-PHP/
Does go another pass over the original file to get CRC, which could be cached.

[sharpdressedcodes]

That one was updated 8 months ago. You could just make another script to get the crc of each file one time, and as you say cache that. It wouldn't take much modifying.

[Ruffio]

@sharpdressedcodes is this still an issue?

[XECDesign]

No activity and no plans to add this in the near future.