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Skin Packager from command line?

General topics related to Rainmeter.
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Nightblade
Posts: 20
Joined: August 21st, 2012, 5:17 am

Skin Packager from command line?

Post by Nightblade »

Can you control the Skin Packager from the command line?

I did a bit of googling but couldn't find anything :(
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jsmorley
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Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA

Re: Skin Packager from command line?

Post by jsmorley »

No, you cannot.

We had a lot of trouble very early on with bad actors trying to distribute malware of one form or another with Rainmeter skins, and that was when we came up with the .rmskin format. It has been almost entirely successful in eliminating this problem, in addition of course to making installing skins a ton easier for our users.

The key to the .rmskin format is that while it is basically a .zip archive file, the skin packager program adds a "thumbprint" to the resulting file. This thumbprint is read and required by the skin installer program.

While this is not unbreakable, nothing is, it does make it impossible to just create a .zip and rename it. It means that for the causal bad actor, they have to actually use the skin packager tool, and go through the steps to create the .rmskin. This seems, thankfully, to have put this into the "more trouble than it is worth" category, and we have not really had any problems since.

It makes it impossible to just rename a .rmskin to .zip, extract it, change it, zip it back up, and rename back it to .rmskin. That won't work, and on balance that is a good thing. You can't "edit" a .rmskin in any way, but must always create it "from scratch", and must use the skin packager tool.

We are hesitant to create any kind of command-line or scripted capabilities. It would only serve to make it easier to mass-produce .rmskins, which has no utility for any use that is good. While it is a bit of hands-on work to create a .rmskin for distribution, it is just not something that you do many times a day, and we feel is a reasonable price for the benefits the approach brings to the community.
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