Enabling the Distributed Family Tree

Welcome!

by Hilton on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 | 411 Views

The release I tried to post yesterday, Genesis 0.0.2, contains only the core stuff. This is to fit within the file size constraints of Google Code. In order to do anything useful, then, you first need to install the PGVAgent feature. The process to manually do this is:

Go to Help –> Find and Install
Select “Search for new features to install” and click “Next”
Click “New Remote Site”
Enter “Distributed Family Tree Project” for the name and “http://www.dftproject.org/updates/” for the URL and click “Finish”
Wait while Genesis retrieves a list of features from the update site
Select the PGVAgent feature and click “Next”
Select “I accept the terms in the license agreement” and click “Next”
Click “Finish”
Wait for Genesis to download PGVAgent
Click “Install”
Click “Yes” to restart Genesis

Long and laborious, and all this just to get started! Unacceptable. So in Genesis 0.0.8 you are now greeted with:

Welcome View

All you have to do is click “Install PGVAgent” and then wait for Genesis to download, install, and dynamically configure it without any intervention whatsoever. That’s right, no questions asked.

The Eclipse update mechanism is really great, but it’s designed with programmers in mind. It’s just too much for a typical user (well, to tell you the truth, it’s often too much for a typical programmer as well… “Just install it already!”). Fortunately it was a piece of cake to streamline the whole process. In some future where more and more plug-ins become available I’d like to create a snazzy feature search feature with ratings and the whole nine yards. For now, though, at least it will be easy to get the PGVAgent plug-in.

P.S. - You may be wondering what happened with versions 0.0.1 and 0.0.3-0.0.7. The way I set it up, the version number increments each time I commit a change to the source code repository. The first version I released, 0.0.0, corresponds with the code that I first put in the repository (i.e. revision 1). After making some changes and commiting them (revision 2), I tried to release Genesis 0.0.2 (which noone has seen because I couldn’t get it uploaded to Google Code). I then made several more changes, with corresponding commits (revisions 3-8), the last of which I again tried to released, this time as Genesis 0.0.8. To make a long story short, you can expect the version number to skip a lot.

P.P.S. - As soon as I add some database upgrade logic, I’ll try one more time to repost Genesis on Google Code. Failing that, I’ll just put it on this website and link to it. So there’s something to maybe look forward to.