#23 Libxml2-bin/doc gets overwritten by libxml-bin/doc

[Frank van Meurs]

When using the download.bat script to install packages, it downloads lists of bin/doc/lib/dep/... packages which should be downloaded. It then sorts each by date in order to get the latest version of each package. A fairly decent approach in itself. However, libxml was superseded by libxml2, yet the bin and doc packages of libxml (version 1.8.17) are more recent than those of libxml2 (2.4.12-1). Thus, the download tool installs:

- Mar 05 2002 /libxml/1.8.17/libxml1-1.8.17-doc.zip
- Jun 23 2002 /libxml/2.4.12-1/libxml2-2.4.12-1-lib.zip
- Mar 05 2002 /libxml/1.8.17/libxml1-1.8.17-bin.zip

Instead of:

Dec 23 2001 /libxml/2.4.12-1/libxml2-2.4.12-bin.zip
Jun 23 2002 /libxml/2.4.12-1/libxml2-2.4.12-1-lib.zip
Dec 23 2001 /libxml/2.4.12-1/libxml2-2.4.12-doc.zip

Unfortunately, although one would assume it would be the valid way to work around this, listing these packages in the include.txt file (i.e. by adding two lines for bin and doc, as described for wget in the comments in the file) doesn't work. It somehow doesn't pick up on the packages and just downloads the 'newer' ones. Unfortunately, my knowledge of sed is exactly nil, so I can't specify why it doesn't.

What *does* work is adding the batch command "pause" between lines 531 and 533 (e.g. at line 532) and quickly editing the bin.lst and doc.lst files by changing the dates on /libxml/2.4.12-1/libxml2-2.4.12-doc.zip and /libxml/2.4.12-1/libxml2-2.4.12-bin.zip to something newer than the dates for the libxml1-1.8.17 package.

However, the preferred solution would be to check for version numbers, instead of dates when sorting *and* properly checking the include.txt file for specific package versions.

[Jay Satiro]

Thanks for your report. If I remember correctly those packages were meant to be downloaded for backwards compatibility because other packages may rely on them. If you need libxml2 I strongly suggest you download the builds from ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/win32/ rather than the 2001 build from gnuwin32. Choose the build earlier this year June 2011. I will be in touch with the gnuwin32 team to find out what's up with the libxml2 package.

[Jay Satiro]

Thanks for your report. This project survives for legacy purposes and further maintenance is limited. I acknowledge this is a bug but it's too much of a corner case to work on. I'm closing as out of date.