wpkg 0.8.0 available
Finally, after countless hours working at it, we got 0.8.0 out!
This version includes a large number of new advanced features that allow you to very easily manage a target system, manage indexes of packages, and much much more.
All the features are already documented on this website so I won't try to re-document them here! If you are just starting with wpkg, make sure to go slowly. There is a lot to learn if you want to become an expert but in most cases you can just use the basics, see the following pages:
- wpkg --build
- control file (at first concentrate on the mandatory fields, and the Depends field.)
- wpkg --install
- wpkg --remove
Other commands are superflous for beginners. Once you understand the basics, you'll be able to delve in much more complicated matters such as creating repositories and using the --update and --upgrade commands.
There is a list of what I think are the most important new features:
- wpkg supports path that reference network drives (\\server\share\path, it also supports the smb://... syntax)
- wpkg can download files from an HTTP server
- wpkg reads system wide and user defined configuration files
- wpkg can self-upgrade under MS-Windows
- wpkg generates much better logs and verbosity on install/remove
- wpkg understands repositories and automatic upgrades
- wpkg has advanced unit tests and was fully validated for medical device use
- wpkg better supports Unicode throughout the entire tool
- wpkg supports the Hold selection and required priority
- wpkg properly handles a Ctlr-C (cancel) situation
- wpkg compiles under Darwin, Mingw, Cygwin, Fedora, SunOS, and FreeBSD
All of that and the tool in generate got a very large number of bugs fixed. You may want to check out the ChangeLog in the source package. It is also present in the wpkg binary package under /usr/shared/wpkg/changelog.gz (under MS-Windows, no there is no /usr sub-directory.)
One thing to know though: the new version prevents the use a many more filenames. It should not affect you if you have been using wpkg under MS-Windows since those filenames are special names that MS-Windows have reserved. For example, the name COM1 cannot be used as a regular filename. Therefore it cannot appear in a package built with wpkg. This may have some side effects on Linux packages. Furthermore, the test for duplicate files within a directory changed to be case insensitive. This means even though Linux supports have two files such as wpkg and WPKG, the package prevents you from having both in the same directory. So far we have not found a project that had to have such filenames and if necessary, a script could be used to palliate to the problem.
One bug fixed: the bz2 decompression now works in all cases. We found one more problem that got fixed.
This version is much more robust than any version prior. With all the unit test, we will ensure that it remains that way. I hope you will enjoy it as I do!
