Unix GNU Windows / News: Recent posts

We are happy to announce the release of Unigw v1.0.0! It comes with a Windows 7+ 64-bit installer for the full suite of wpkg and Package Explorer. Also the source is bundled together instead of separately, since Package Explorer is really just wpkg-gui (and we might change the name to that officially at some point).

There have been numerous bug fixes, most notably with upgrading newer packages from existing repository sources. Some diagnostic messages have also been improved as well. We also are introducting a new command-line option, "--output-json, which changes wpkg's output into a pure JSON-structured output. This is useful for scripting (and our paying client asked us for this feature).... read more

As wpkg is getting a larger and larger user base, some bugs are being found...

This revision corrected some problems introduced by the os_filename() function, which checks and tends to reject files that do not match certain criteria (the fix was actually applied to os_stat() which is called before os_filename().) One of the main problem was that we could not install files from a remote location (using HTTP.) That includes a missing empty line at the end of the header.... read more

I see I did not post anything about the fact that 0.9.x includes a compatible version of Package Explorer: version 0.3.0. There were changes to Package Explorer so it would compile, but otherwise nothing really serious was changed to the tool as a whole.

If you want to use wpkg 0.8.x then you should stick with Package Explorer 0.2.x.

It looks like I missed posting updates here since 0.9.2...

There are the entries from the ChangeLog. The most important parts where:

1. Fix to the --build so it would make use of canonicalized architecture information instead of of peeking at the package filename
2. Fix the --install so it computes all the possible trees before giving up on an installation
3. Fix to the remove URI check when loading data from a repository
4. Fix to the output of a wpkg help function which would eventually write garbage because it was using a string buffer that was eventually gone by the time it was being printed
5. Fixed the MS-Windows operating system to "mswindows" instead of "win32" and "win64" (i.e. the architecture is "amd64" or "i386" and the operating system is "mswindows".)
6. Many other small fixes all around wpkg and its libraries.... read more

I noticed a problem with filenames in 0.9.0 which would change many characters with %XX notation (URI way to handle characters that are not in the ASCII plan.)

Fixed a couple other problems too. If you started using 0.9.0, I strongly advise that you upgrade to 0.9.1 as it fixes a rather ugly bug. Note that 0.8.x was not affected.

This is a new release! Tons of new features and fixes. Please check out the ChangeLog in the root directory of the project source file (it is also present in the binary packages!)

See also the post about it: http://windowspackager.org/news/wpkg-090-available

I see I did not post a note here about 0.8.0 and I just uploaded 0.8.1!

The new version includes a small set of fixes, especially, I added support for long file names and symbolic links. As you may know, the default tar tool has a limit of 100 characters for a symbolic links, and 100 + 155 for a prefix and filename (but a slash character has to fall at the exact right place to really support 256 characters, and plus, the name of the file itself is still limited to 100 characters.) To remedy we make use of the GNU extensions. later we may look into using the PAX header instead (IBM and GNU tar actually make use the PAX header, but not libtar!)... read more

Many more updates in wpkg and a lot more documentation at http://windowspackager.org/ !

I fixed many things, especially, some compression problems with both z and bz2 were resolved for large and packages with "the wrong size".

I test many more fields which all need to be correct. As that grows you may discover that some of your control file fields are invalid!

Added support for compiling all the libraries as DLLs, including the bz2 library which compiles with the proper import/export. I added a copy of the libtld library to test the URIs validity (i.e. only official TLDs can be used!)... read more

It looks like since 12.10 a set of functions were moved in Unix. Some files need to include the unistd.h header file. So if you have problems compiling under Linux, just add to those files:

#include <unistd.h>

Not too sure whether it was in 0.7.1 but I also got an error to do with a class not having a virtual destructor, just add this line in the wpkgar_output class and it will compile safely:

virtual ~wpkgar_output() {}

I just released 0.7.0 but found a couple of major problems and thus had to quickly release 0.7.1. The two main problems were to do with large file bz2 compression and large files (i.e. data.tar.gz) added to the final .deb file (the ar archive.)

As I was at it, I also fixed the security issue in the extraction code. Now the software checks that any ".." does not have the capability to extract a file outside of the destination directory.... read more

wpkg 0.7.0 is here!

This version is something like 99% complete in regard to functionality of a packager. So if you know dpkg, you'll know how to use wpkg. It's very easy and it works to create (--build) packages, install or upgrade (--install) packages, and to remove (--remove) packages.

For a more complete documentation, see the new website:

http://windowspackager.org/documentation/wpkg

The old documentation will probably remain available, but it doesn't match the new version of wpkg 1 to 1...... read more

This is quite a milestone. Not only did I fix a lot of the code (especially the directory and archive code) but now you can build a package with the --build command line option!

The --build understands two formats: a directory a la Debian and a .info file. This is quite powerful since with a single .info file you can create multiple packages (i.e. runtime, source, documentation, etc.)

Let me know if you like it! 8-)... read more

Following a post on our forum, I noticed that my wpkg tarbal & zip files did NOT include the database necessary for wpkg to function with no error.

I thus created new packages including that (so you should use 0.4+ and drop 0.2 & 0.3 for now).

Since I also thought that some people may not want to install MSYS, I removed the test of the MSYS dynamic library. This way, the only constrain is that wpkg be placed under a directory named bin (i.e. /bin/wpkg)... read more

Hi guys,

I fixed the install in the previous version so you cannot install a package if a dependency is missing.

In this version, I fixed the removal of a package which is in used by another when that other package is still installed.

In other words, you need the gcc-core to install gcc-g++. If you do not install gcc-core first, wpkg generates an error when you try to install gcc-g++. Install gcc-core first and the error goes away.... read more

I'm making some progress. We still need to test the packages to make sure they work properly, yet here they are!

So now you can download unzip.exe and wpkg_0.2_win32-i386.zip, install that, download the different .deb and install them with wpkg --install <package name>.

If you install msys first, then you can right away start rxvt and use wpkg straight from your new Unix shell.

If you have any problems or cannot find the package you are looking for, gimme a buzz.... read more

Well... Looking into the installation process, I thought it could be better if wpkg was to be used to install msys (what a concept!)

So I tweaked wpkg a little to be able to do just that. Now you can download wpkg by itself and then install msys from its .deb file.

This works great and makes more sense. Now we can have upgrades for msys seperate from wpkg. Plus, the versioning will work a lot better. If msys does not change in 12 months, but wpkg does change to 0.3, 0.4, etc. it will be a lot more sensical this way.... read more

Welcome to the UniGW News!

I finally got something out! It took a little longer than I hoped but there is a first step toward a better world (I can dream, right?!)

So?! What is UniGW???

At this time, that's two packages: USYS and wpkg. USYS is MSYS + wpkg pre-installed. wpkg is a [not yet complete] clone of the famous Debian dpkg tool. It will install and remove files from .deb packages with incredible ease.... read more