In general, a new user is not going to have most of the files needed to proceed past the "you're missing some files" barrier at the very start. At the time of writing, when the current version encounters this issue, it "helps" by just spitting out the XML-tagged names of the files along with URLs to the mod pages (except in the 2 cases where it can download the files directly, though this is the exception and not the rule). On most "normal" command prompts, it's very difficult to use those URLs effectively.
Caveat
There's a pretty significant non-technical limitation on what we can do here. We need to appreciate the fact that in practice, most of the files that give us trouble here are files that we do not have permission to download directly. It's technically possible to do this, but if we start going around just ignoring authors' and hosting sites' reasonable demands for using their content, then we might as well just zip up the "mods" folder and a few key others, and just distribute that. If you want that crap, go somewhere else.
Because of this caveat, there's always going to be a certain degree of manual effort the first time to set up STEP Core and STEP Extended, and probably most other packs as well. It's possible that some interesting packs will emerge that only (or mostly) use mods which are freely available for download, but that doesn't really seem likely.
All that being said, as long as you don't delete your old downloads after installing, you're probably going to have a much smoother time the next time you go to install / update a similar pack.
Proposed Solution
It should be fairly easy to just generate a .html file with a table that looks kinda like the below, and open it with the user's browser:
Use Case
In general, a new user is not going to have most of the files needed to proceed past the "you're missing some files" barrier at the very start. At the time of writing, when the current version encounters this issue, it "helps" by just spitting out the XML-tagged names of the files along with URLs to the mod pages (except in the 2 cases where it can download the files directly, though this is the exception and not the rule). On most "normal" command prompts, it's very difficult to use those URLs effectively.
Caveat
There's a pretty significant non-technical limitation on what we can do here. We need to appreciate the fact that in practice, most of the files that give us trouble here are files that we do not have permission to download directly. It's technically possible to do this, but if we start going around just ignoring authors' and hosting sites' reasonable demands for using their content, then we might as well just zip up the "mods" folder and a few key others, and just distribute that. If you want that crap, go somewhere else.
Because of this caveat, there's always going to be a certain degree of manual effort the first time to set up STEP Core and STEP Extended, and probably most other packs as well. It's possible that some interesting packs will emerge that only (or mostly) use mods which are freely available for download, but that doesn't really seem likely.
All that being said, as long as you don't delete your old downloads after installing, you're probably going to have a much smoother time the next time you go to install / update a similar pack.
Proposed Solution
It should be fairly easy to just generate a .html file with a table that looks kinda like the below, and open it with the user's browser:
Files Needed