[Galaxy S I9000 Android Development] Kino87:
Depends, AppRestore.zip is used to restore the backup created with AppBackup.zip.

AppBackup.zip creates a .tar file that includes the path from the root (so if you have your apps in /data/app you will have those two directorys in the .tar, otherwise you will have /system/user_app). At the restore time the .tar is simply extracted to the root.

Maybe you are confusing AppRestore (used to restore backups) with AppRevert (used to move back apps in /data/app), but still... it does what it should do (I think).

Soon I will release a 0.3 version that aggregate AppMover and AppReverter in a single package that toggles the place where apps are stored and aggregate AppBackup and AppRestore so that if it finds /system/user_app it will create a backup and if it doesn't find it it will restore it (bringing down the number of zips from 4 to 2, but the operations you have to do remains the same). Less chances to human errors and more to script bugs, so if something happens you can blame it on me :p

Right now I'm thinking to a complete rework with a couple of alternatives since I think this suite is a little bit impractical:

- create something that changes the partition layout splitting /system in a 512mb partition for /system and a 1536mb partition for /data/app... Still I'd prefear to find some alternative since this solution could create pretty big problems if something goes wrong and it won't have native support in the roms/kernels (wich means you would still have to flash a file every time you update the rom to tell it how to manage the partitions and I'm not really shure what would happen when the CM updater script tries to format system and it finds is smaller than intendend, so it may be impossible to do).

- Create an alternative update script that replaces the one in the CM10 zip and does what I wrote above (you would have to modify the CM10 zip every time, but it would be as simple as drag and drop one file in it).

- As alternative to the the repartitioning create an image file of an ext4 partition and mount it runtime (like we did with One Click Lagfix a couple of years ago). It should be easy to customize the zip so that you can chose where to create this file and how big it has be so that you can place it in /system but also in /sdcard or in /emmc. Still... you will have to flash something that teaches how to handle it to the rom every time you update it and if you put in /system you will still have to backup and restore it every damn time (so I guess is pretty useless).

To be honest I don't think that altering the partition layout without official support in the rom is a practical solution since I think negative aspects are way bigger than positive ones but I still think this solution is quite annoying if you update your rom often as I do, so if anyone has suggestions they are welcome.

By the way while I can see the actual rom partitioning has some serius limitations but I understand the reasons behind Pawitp decisions and I hope we won't get different partition layouts on different roms (that will just be a mess e we will end up with different version of kernels ad patches.. We need no more fragmentation than we already have with our device being 2 years old and having roms starting from 2.1 to the actual 4.1.1)