About Us

Windows Packager (or wpkg for short) was created and is maintained by Made to Order Software Corporation.

We have been working under Unix environments for over 20 years and it has always felt illogical to work with MS-Windows in an environment where you cannot in any way control what gets installed and what doesn't get installed.

We wanted to use the dpkg tool from the Debian Linux environment. However, the implementation of that software is horrendous and does not even remotely compile under MS-Windows (even in the mingw321 environment) Not only that, they use pipes and fork() which is really totally unnecessary.

This being said, we do use the exact same file format. In other words, you could generate a package using the dpkg-deb tool (assuming it can accept the proper environment specifications) and then install those packages on Windows using wpkg. This has been tested many times and it works just fine.

Note that wpkg is being developed under Linux so it compiles and run perfectly under Linux. To make it easier to compile, we completly removed all dependencies to the boost library. The first few versions (0.1 to 0.6) where all requiring boost, which is a problem since it changed dramatically and the newest versions are really not compatible. Instead we have reimplemented the necessary parts so as to eliminate the need for boost. 0.8 and 0.9 work very well and do not include any boost requirements.