depp.jones,
I am reposting this from here for discussion and to give any other users the opportunity to jump in.
Thanks for packaging KiTTY! Would it be possible to have all of its supporting binaries included in its PortableApp package? If you install the PortableApp package for PuTTY and look in the App\putty directory, you can see that App\KiTTY should likewise have: kageant.exe, kittygen.exe, kitty.exe, (I agree, it is unnecessary) klink.exe, kscp.exe, and ksftp.exe.
I personally do use all of these programs (I can't imagine life without kageant) and would be happy to test.
As all of those have to be called directly, they'll bypass the portable launcher
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
How would including these programs make this not portable? The PuTTY PortableApp includes its analogues of them as it stands, right now. The .EXEs are just copied into App\PuTTY and left there. Yes, SOME of them would bypass the launcher. So what?
kitty_portable.exe, kittygen.exe, and kageant.exe are very much essential to the proper operation of the software. Sure you can get by with just having kitty_portable.exe, but generating a keypair with kittygen.exe and loading it into memory with kageant.exe at startup makes life SO much easier. They should be listed in the PortableApps menu, if at all possible.
klink.exe, kscp.exe, and ksftp.exe are all programs to be used with Command Prompt or PowerShell, so should NOT be listed in the PortableApps menu, but should nevertheless be included in the package.
Thanks for your input. I can do a test build with kageant, kittygen and the supporting shell programs. I cannot do the testing myself because I don't use these.
It is another situation than with PuTTY because of the way both are portablized. PuTTY Portable uses the registry (and therefore maybe the supporting apps store information in the same branch) while KiTTY portable stores it's settings in a file and folder structure. There were a lot of inconsistencies with leftover registry entries (obviously from porting PuTTY code to KiTTY) in the past.
I'll see what comes out.
I did a quick'n'dirty test and it is not a simple task if not impossible for now. While the command line tools don't seem to affect portability at a first glance, kageant does. When kitty (portable) is launched through the "new session" menu entry from kageant, it bypasses the launcher and creates a new (additional) set of settings in its App folder (the same way as launching kitty_portable.exe directly). I have no idea how to deal with this because that behaviour appears to be hard coded. I found no settings for kageant - neither a file nor regitry entries.
So for now, I stay with the old package setup. Maybe I'll do some further testing later, but my spare time is a bit limited atm.
How are you testing, exactly? I would like to participate but I'm not sure how PortableApps works, exactly. Can you give me a step-by-step so that we can be on the same page?
Thanks for your offer. I won't continue that development, though.
You can try yourself. Drop kageant.exe in the App/KiTTY folder, launch KiTTYPortable.exe in the KiTTYPortable main folder. You should see a list of your saved sessions. Now launch kageant, choose "new session" from the rightclick-menu and see what happens in the App/KiTTY folder.
While KiTTYPortable uses the KiTTYPortable\Data folder so store its settings (PA.c guidelines) the New session from kageant results in a new launch of kitty that creates a whole new set of settings in its own folder. As this is hard coded, I see no way to cope with that.
If you don't care, you can put kageant.exe in the App/KiTTY folder by yourself. It will be deleted on every update, though.