Portable Scoop

[gsal]

Hi,

So...I am looking into having a portable Scoop installation.

Yes, I searched Discussions and Issues and:

• I was a bit confused about the various aspects those threads are addressing
• I was getting dizzy, feeling like I was going in circles as threads kept having links to other threads
• Most importantly, I was disappointed to see every wish for a portable Scoop to be shut down...is this still true? Because I find this just a bit ironic.

As I read the Scoop literature, I found that

The [wiki] "So What" page says:

[Scoop] installs applications independently and in a self-contained way...

The [wiki] "Apps" page says:

An app is a self-contained, independent unit.

The [wiki] "Dependencies" page says:

Apps are self-contained units
They should keep their own copies of any libraries they need to run, and
not rely on or interfere with any libraries outside their own install path.

So, apps are already supposed to be self-contained, and
shims enable apps to run from wherever Scoop is installed;
yet, it does not appear that the Scoop installation itself is portable...what's the blocker?

I see some thread talking about ~/.config/scoop. I still don't know what that is for and how it stops a portable Scoop installation. I would like to think/speculate that given the contents of this file, it is more for admin purposes than for use purposes; in other words, if users are not going to be installing additional apps, they don't need this file...only the admin. True?

At this early stage in my familiarity with Scoop, I am only aware of two issues that may be keeping me from a portable Scoop:

1.- ./apps/<app>/current

Within an app subdirectory, the junction current points to the full path of the latest version.
I would like to think that this is not much of a blocker, as this can be changed to be a relative path.

2.- ./shims/<app>.shim

The app *.shim file has, hard-coded in it, the full path to the app executable.
I would like to have a way to dynamically determine this.
When it comes to launch scripts, one of the first things one typically does is to find out the location of the launch script itself:

• Windows/batch: %~dp0
• Linux/bash: $(dirname $(readlink -f $0))

If only there was a way for the *.exe/*.shim pair to use environment variables so that
instead of: path = "C:\Users\<userid>\scoop\apps\make\current\bin\make.exe"
one could do: path = "%SCOOP_HOME%\apps\make\current\bin\make.exe"

Is this possible?
what would it take?
enhance scoop shim ?

Please advise.

[gsal]

Well, to answer my own question...yes, it is possible.

In the last couple of days, I learned what a shim is
Downloaded shim.c sources from github
Changed the program
Decided to not even bother with %SCOOP_HOME%, just leave the unique part of the path
and just let shim.exe determine its own path (...\shims<app>.exe) and from there work out the path to apps, etc.
For more details, please refer to the reply in my other post.