reactos/base/applications/rapps/README.ENG

For more information about RAPPS, take a look at <https://reactos.org/wiki/RAPPS>

ADDING DOWNLOADABLE PROGRAMS TO THE RAPPS DATABASE
--------------------------------------------------

Each program entry consists of a text file formatted with an INI-like syntax.

They must be encoded in UTF-16 LE (Little Endian) or characters out of the ANSI range
will display broken mojibake, some editors like Notepad++ call this format UCS-2 Little Endian.

If you plan on including your program entry in the ReactOS source code versioning keep in mind
that entries are stored in UTF-8 without BOM (Byte Order Mask) for VCS friendliness.

They get automatically converted to UTF-16 when creating the compressed rappmgr.cab package,
which is how clients obtain their program lists every time a Database upgrade is triggered.

Also, each [Section] is language-independent and individual, you can override the URL to a source
program or any other field by adding a language-specific [Section.], followed by the language code.

NOTE: You can find a complete listing of LCIDs and language names here, includes neutral codes:
     <https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd318693%28v=vs.85%29.aspx>

Now RAPPS also accepts neutral language codes, meaning that you can do things like this:

  ; Default English fallback, used if everything else fails.
  [Section]
  Name = Name in English

  ; Neutral Spanish, used if the specific variant of Spanish does not match.
  [Section.0a]
  Name = Name in Generic Spanish

  ; Spanish from Spain, used if the system is configured for it.
  [Section.0c0a]
  Name = Name in Castilian Spanish


You can also define an entry without English fallback to make it visible to certain users only.
For instance; software from 1C, which is mostly for Russian speakers and unusable for anyone else.

File format overview:

  ; This is a INI-style comment, useful for adding additional information.
  ; Lines starting with a ; character are skipped by the parser.

  [Section]
  Name = My fun stuff-o-matic
  RegName = Name in Registry
  Version = 1.1.1
  License = GPL
  Description = Shortish description giving some additional background information about what it does.
  Size = 10 MB
  Category = 5
  URLSite = https://example.org/
  URLDownload = https://ftp.example.org/pub/installer.exe
  CDPath = ; Path in the local filesystem

  [Section.0419] ; 0419 - for Russian language
  Description = Description in Russian language
  ...


The mandatory fields are: Name, Category and URLDownload
All other fields are completely optional and can be skipped.

List of valid categories:
 1 - Audio
 2 - Video
 3 - Graphics
 4 - Games
 5 - Internet
 6 - Office
 7 - Development
 8 - Edutainment
 9 - Engineering
10 - Finance
11 - Science
12 - Tools
13 - Drivers
14 - Libraries
15 - Other

The official list of downloadable programs is kept on a public ReactOS server
and synced every time RAPPS is launched for the first time.

NOTE: You can find the most current URL in rapps.h, defined as APPLICATION_DATABASE_URL.

To generate a RAPPS database (usually a rappmgr.cab archive), use the included scripts:

For Windows & other NT-derived: CreateCabFile.bat
For Linux & other UNIX flavors: CreateCabFile.sh


Once the rappmgr.cab is downloaded to %appdata%\rapps, RAPPS extracts it using cabinet.dll
inside %appdata%\rapps\rapps, after that, it will parse all the *.txt files contained therein.

Every subsequent time the program tries to access the local .txt files
until a database update is manually triggered by the user.

If the rappmgr.cab file is moved or just missing, RAPPS will download it again.