Distributing customized portable client

Hey Nick (or whoever else may be of assistance)

I'm running into a small snafoo when trying to make a customized portable client to distribute for Materia Magica. I'm wanting to pre-package a bunch of plugins that players have shared over the years, and basically have it run exactly like the Aardwolf client does (in that its completely self-sufficient, portable, and doesn't save any paths whatsoever).

The issue I'm having is that after I download and "install" it to my desktop and configure it, the plugins that I load have absolute file paths, and that becomes an issue if I try to load it from another computer. I've followed the steps to edit the mySQL database to include the relative paths (.\worlds\) and that works to an extent, but once those plugins are loaded it reverts the paths in the mySQL database to those absolute paths, instead of the appropriate relative paths.

Instead of going through the database and manually changing each filepath to .\whatever\whatever, is there an easier way I can accomplish this?

So in a nutshell I want to:

1) Customize the client to include all the plugins that I want new users to be able to utilize

2) Have it not save any paths, so the program can run standalone off of a flash drive, or Linux distribution

3) Not have any of those pesky state file errors or filepath errors I always encounter.


I'm sure there is a very simple way to doing this, but its been a busy week and my brain is fried.

Thanks ahead of time!

-Forral

I'm not sure there is an easy solution. It tends to convert relative paths to absolute ones, because relative paths can be a pain, for example if a plugin changes the current directory.

Just having an automated process to fix up the database prior to zipping it up shouldn't be too bad.

I assume the problem is for end users to be able to use the same customized instance on multiple computers without running it from a thumb drive all the time? Because the initial setup is easily managed by version control. Fix the file once, check it in, and never check in a ruined copy. But I don't think it's such a simple thing, as Nick says, to make MUSHclient just always use relative paths.

It already can. I assume you mean something else.