Addon that writes over core Estuary skin files

[bossanova808]

I make an addon (OzWeather) and a supplementary Addon (OzWeather Skinpatcher) - which helps people get full OzWeather support (animated weather radars) - in various skins (because this is an Australia only weather addon, I don’t think most Skin writers will want to support it, hence this tool).

Basically, it swaps in a new MyWeather.xml for a variety of skins, Aeon, Confluence, Amber etc. This patcher needs to be re-run when a skin update arrives, but overall it makes it easy for folks to get the nice weather radars they want.

Generally it works a treat, however with Coreelec (and Libreelec), my patcher addon can’t write to the skin.estuary folder - this entire area is read only.

I have tried various mount commands etc, but I can’t seem to make this folder writeable on a temporary basis. Is that in fact possible, and if so - how? I’d really like to find a way to get this working as a lot of folks in Aus. seem to use Coreelec with Estuary…(I use Coreelec obviously, but not Estuary).

Also - this got me thinking - how does Kodi itself update addons in this area, e.g. like updates to Estuary, if this area is read only?

Thanks for any help!

[vpeter]

You can’t edit files directly because they reside on readonly squashfs file.
Instead you need to copy whole skin folder from /usr/share/kodi/addons/skin.estuary to /storage/.kodi/addons and then edit files there.

[gregeeh]

The solution is already in your Wiki:

        #!/bin/sh
        rsync -a --exclude 'addon.xml' --exclude 'MyWeather.xml' --exclude 'VideoFullScreen.xml' /usr/share/kodi/addons/skin.estuary/ /storage/.kodi/addons/skin.estuary-mod/
        /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/kodi-send -a ReloadSkin

Which is exactly what @vpeter suggested. I have a cron setup to run this script daily and it works a treat.

[bossanova808]

Right, yep the copying the skin approach works, sure.

I was just trying to come at it another way. I guess because I don’t get how Kodi itself can update an addon in the readonly area, as it clearly can (e.g. an Estuary skin update comes along). If it can do it…seems like there must be a workaround to make the patcher work without folks having to go through the ‘copy skin and rename id’ approach.

[vpeter]

Estuary skin addon is not updated from repo but it is always part of the CE image (as readonly squashfs file). So the only workaround for you is to copy whole addon first and then modify it.

[bossanova808]

Ok thanks…surprised that those core add-ons don’t get updates outside of the image, but that’s very clear, there is no workaround here!