Zeal: Persist installed docset summary on file system

[Staberinde]

I've been using Zeal for about a week now and I'm very impressed by it.

One of the things that's missing from it in my mind is simple way to persist some form of metadata denoting the docsets downloaded in a particular Zeal instance in a format that allows easy synchronisation across Zeal instances via version control.

Let me give you an example of my use case:

I have a work laptop for work-related coding, and a personal laptop for coding in my spare time. I synchronise most of my configuration files between the two computers by means of a git repository and symlinks. I would like to synchronise the docsets between the two, such that when I download a new docset (on either computer) a form of file storage is updated which provides a unique identifier of the docset such that when I add a new docset, it is persisted via Zeal.conf or another file, and when I sync this changed via to my other computer, I can perform an update all on that instance of zeal and it will fetch the latest docsets specified in file storage from their feed.

Looking through the configuration files of Zeal, this doesn't currently seem to be possible. Zeal does keep a cached json file managing sources and versioning, but unfortunately as far as I can see it doesn't distinguish between installed docsets and those not installed.

I realise that this is fundamentally two pieces of work; exporting the docset identifiers, and allowing update all or other functionality to instantiate docsets as well as existing ones. If you would like me to split this into two separate issues please let me know.

[trollixx]

Thanks for the suggestion. A better app configuration portability is definitely on my todo.

My plan is to have a local database for docset management tasks, but perhaps it'd be a good idea to add an option to export/import the list of installed docsets, or keeping such list as a separate configuration file...

[Patabugen]

Is there any mileage in having a text-based config file listing the docsets to be installed, that can then be transferred easily (e.g. in Dropbox, rsynced, or even in a git repo) and Zeal can install/remove docs when it loads (or with a popup/timer/button/cli option).

I don't know if it's possible to access/store older versions of docs - but if they are it could also reference the version of the docset required. For example "Laravel" has only one option, but I could be using 5.5 or 5.7 (or even 4) and having the docs which match my code exactly is helpful.

The text file could resemble NPM, composer or similar's package manager configs:

{
    "laravel": "~5.0",
    "jQuery": "1.4",
}