Explaining DEVPACKAGE and how folders are arranged in .sense

Explaining DEVPACKAGE and how folders are arranged in .sense

.sense 2.0 and above uses the “devpackage” file layout. This layout is used to manage multiple device kernels, cores and modules as well as different application packages, we can use this with the AROMA installer to create a friendly option screen to select what device you are running on as well as what kernel you wish to use. Here is a run down on what all of the folders do and how they link into the installation.

**META-INF** Holds all of the installer information including device, kernel and package selection. This uses the AROMA installer and also holds the manifest information (not important).

**devicesupport** This folder holds the special packages, kernels and modules for running the ROM on a different device other than the “marvel”, it holds 3 sub-folders “kernels” “modules” and “system”, the kernels folder holds all of the kernels available that run on the device - this kernel folder has folders in it called Devicename_Kernel_Number (an example of this would be “MarvelKernel1”), inside these folders there is one boot.img in each, this file will write itself to the BOOT partition on your phone if you have the device and have selected this kernel in the installer. Upon installation of the kernel it will need modules, the modules are extensions of the kernel that don’t need to be loaded full time by the system, these are used normally for WiFi. The “system” folder allows you to run the ROM on any other phone, it normally contains folders like lib, bin and usr however these can vary from different device support folders depending what needs to be changed, the installer will first install the /system folder (see bellow) then overwrites so files with the ones in this folder.

**extractinfo** This folder is a simple folder that is set to extract everything in it into /system, we use it for extracting sample text documents or identifiers to say that you are running .sense - we can configure it to do different things but we don’t really need to do anything else. We use it mainly for the theme configuration. We keep it separate from the /system folder because it will extract even if you don’t want to extract the /system folder.

**packages-onlyone** & **packages** These folders hold the packages that you can select via AROMA (the installer GUI) depending on what you need - it is pretty simple and just extracts the contents of the folder to wherever specified in the updater-script (the “install what and where script”) in META-INF (see above).

**scripts** This contains simple scripts that we may need to execute (launch) in the updater-script for some reason. They are normally copied to /tmp (a temporary folder that will be deleted upon reboot), set a special permission to execute and finally execute and do what it needs to do.

**system** This contains the normal files that you get in any normal ROM for it to boot. This includes the needed HTC app such as phone and other things required for a stable option. There will be some files missing but these can normally be found in the packages and packages-onlyone folders.