Download Bundles/Collections

[JohnBoyTheGreat]

Some downloads might be for a specific purpose, and a person might not want to scroll through a long list to download those specific packages, nor to download everything on their long list of packages. It might be nice to be able to select an entire group for a specific topic to download just that grouping.

Bundles would allow a person to setup specific collections of downloads for a particular purpose. These bundles could then be enabled or disabled selectively to be downloaded as a group. Perhaps a bundle could also have the option to place it in a specific directory (yes, I know that is easy to do manually or in a template) with the name of the bundle.

Maybe there could also be an optional ZIP function to compress a bundle for someone who wanted to easily share it with someone else or transfer it to a USB or for some other person.

The bundles would be in addition to the regular applications, so that a person could select a bundle or the application separately.

While it would be nice to have drag-and-drop capability to add applications to bundles, it could just be done via a search or scrolling through a list and selecting the applications to add.

(Since Ketarin can download all kinds of things, perhaps instead of calling them "applications", the downloads should be called "packages"? That's a more inclusive term. I've been using Ketarin to download source code, for example, which isn't really an application.)

I can imagine having bundles listed along with apps, with labels like "System Utilities", "Finance Software", "AI Models/Software", and other groupings like that, so it would be easy choose a specific group of downloads.

[shawn]

While the online database is currently broken from within Ketarin, you can access each individual application here. 

You can share groups of items as XML directly from your database by selecting the members then using CTRL+C. This will copy the applications to your clipboard and you can paste it into your favorite text editor for sharing. Use a code block to share it on the forum. 

[JohnBoyTheGreat]

On 11/9/2025 at 5:32 PM, shawn said:

While the online database is currently broken from within Ketarin, you can access each individual application here. 

You can share groups of items as XML directly from your database by selecting the members then using CTRL+C. This will copy the applications to your clipboard and you can paste it into your favorite text editor for sharing. Use a code block to share it on the forum. 

 

Well, sure, we can share groups of items as a template...but we can't bundle up groups in Ketarin itself, so that we can have just that particular group download and/or update. Instead we have to scroll through a long list, picking and choosing, when we may not want Ketarin to download all of the apps in our list or not update all of them, etc., for various reasons.

For example, a computer tech may want to have a base package of apps to install and/or update on a client's system. The tech could take Ketarin with them on a thumb drive and select "Basic Software for Clients" and automatically install and/or upgrade the software on a client machine. For clients with a specific architecture, they might pick the bundle, "Basic Software for Clients (32-bit)" or "Basic Software for Clients (ARM)" or something like that. Then they may want to install malware software, "Malware Tools".

The purpose of bundles would be to be able to select a group of software easily from a list that could contain hundreds or even thousands of packages, for which a use wouldn't want to have to scroll through and individually set the parameters over and over again for various reasons.

[JohnBoyTheGreat]

By the way, thanks for the link to the applications. I didn't see that anywhere. That's very helpful.

[shawn]

4 hours ago, JohnBoyTheGreat said:

we can't bundle up groups in Ketarin itself

You can create any column you want in Ketarin and if you sort by that column then they'll be organized cleanly. You can make a custom column for shares (or anything else), though if you don't want to use  Category  for it. More about custom columns here and here.

I use the Category field to manage my local downloads using the "save to file" pattern "..\{category}\{appname:regexreplace:([\s\t\r\n\-\&]+):_}-{version}.{url:ext}" for almost everything. In the Ketarin main window just sort by the Category column then click the Category group header to select everything in that Category, CTRL+C, then paste it into Notepad++.

 

If you want a table-style view instead of the XML export use CTRL+SHIFT+C instead of CTRL+C, then paste it into Notepad++ with the Columns++ plugin installed and enabled.

 

[shawn]

I need to preface my response here with a simple statement: I do not use Ketarin to do any installations. At all. I play with it only so I can help people here. It's a feature others use, but I automate the living crap out of stuff externally and use those so I am not tied to a large library that might not be possible to use remotely.

 

4 hours ago, JohnBoyTheGreat said:

...Then they may want to install malware software, "Malware Tools".

This is possible already using categories:

ketarin.exe /silent /category=Security

You can also use the /APPNAME switch to select a specific application in case you want to install from several different categories.

If you don't want to do that you could also juggle categories from the command line using db4s (the Ketarin database is SQLite), then use the /category switch to install them. I would recommend you do that with a copy of your Ketarin DB (then use the "/database=newfile.db" switch) that way you don't have to try to put them back the way they're supposed to be in your real ketarin.db file.