Greetings, all,

I am happy to announce that HackyInstaller (the client-side GUI for sensor
installation and updating) is now available for your review. I've tested
many versions of the system over the past few months, and am now to the
point where I have switched over to HackyInstaller for my own sensor
management. My sense is that it's stable enough for more general use,
although I am sure additional bugs remain.

A few caveats:

* Docbook documentation is not yet available.  Hopefully you developers can
wander through the system without too much problem.  We will, of course,
fix this before a general release.

* HackyInstaller will rewrite your sensor.properties file, as well as write
out a new file called hackyinstaller.xml (into the .hackystat directory).
Although I never do it, you might want to make a copy of sensor.properties
before starting.   (The idea of HackyInstaller is that you no longer have
to do any manual management of the .hackystat directory or its contents.
Indeed, HackyInstaller creates this folder automatically).

* For certain sensors, HackyInstaller needs to know the location of the
tool (or a related directory).  For example, when configuring the Eclipse
sensor, you need to first tell it where your Eclipse is installed.

* HackyInstaller keeps a record of the installed version of a sensor in the
hackyinstaller.xml file.  In order for it to know what version is
installed, it must do the download itself.  Thus, when you bring up
HackyInstaller for the first time, it will assume that all of your sensors
need updating.  Once you've downloaded a sensor using HackyInstaller for
the first time, it records the version associated with that sensor in
hackyinstaller.xml.  Thereafter, each time you bring up HackyInstaller, it
will retrieve the version number associated with the hackystat server and
determine if an update is needed.

* HackyInstaller is not yet integrated with the Hackystat module and build
system.  We will start that integration work shortly.

* HackyInstaller can also be invoked from the command line.  Mike Paulding
is probably the only one who cares about that at present.

So, without further ado, a downloadable version of HackyInstaller is
available at:

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jsakuda/binary/hackyInstaller.jar

Please try it out at your convenience, and send emails regarding your
problems or questions to this list.  There is a hackyinstaller project in
Jira where you can post bugs, but let's discuss your issues on this list
initially.

Kudos to Austen Ito, Julie Sakuda, and James Wang for their very hard work
on this system.  It's been a much more complicated undertaking than I
anticipated, and they have risen to the challenge admirably.

Cheers,
Philip

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