Installer Sources (bookshelves for iPhone) — Broken!
Something is messed up, and I’m having trouble tracking down the issue; the symptoms are:
- An error when you try to add a manybooks.net plist source to Installer.app — intermittent.
- An error “Main script execution failed” when you install a book (possibly fixed?)
- Failure to update an existing list — intermittent.
- Hash value’s don’t match — I’m using PHP’s md5() function to hash the filesize for each book’s zip file. Is that the right approach? Or is Installer.app comparing the hash of the un-zipped file?
All of this is complicated by the difficulty I’ve had in tracking down information on how Installer.app works, the various permissions issues on the iPhone (/var/root/Media vs. /var/mobile/Media is a bit of a headache), and Installer’s recent updates.
iPodTouchFan’s page on Creating a Source Repository for use with Installer.app has been very helpful.
Another useful resource is iPhoneAtlas’ Installer.app troubleshooting page.
Reworking the Books.app creation script to remove extraneous Path information from each book’s zip file has taken care of some of the issues.
But there are still far too many folks having trouble with this, so it’s going to be disabled until it’s sorted out. Sorry folks!