Portable Application Description

The windows shareware community uses a standardised description document: Portable Application Description (PAD).
Because many download sites use these I thought it might be a good idea to generate PAD-files for my programs.
The reference documentation is on asp-software.org and a lot of good information is on mindprod.com.
The listed programs to generate PAD files are typically windows only. But PAD is XML based so it is not so hard to generate some in other ways.
But as usual the devil is in the details. PAD is not so standardized that it is always clear what to enter, especially if you want to promote software for non windows systems.
You can state that your program runs on several platforms but you can only give one download file. Yup file not dir. One install file for all platforms. I was curious how that would work in practise.
Well it does not. I found program which supposedly runs on Windows and OSX which uses a 'install.exe' as installer, oops. The same site showed how to do it correclty.
You have to use a different PAD file per platform and thus a different name, e.g. fausterize OSX, fausterize win …
One more reason to automatise the whole PAD generation process, i.e. the next verison of elephants will generate PAD files for xplatform programs.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License