warp / News: Recent posts

Ok, so I go on holiday on monday for two weeks and am officially winding down now. I may put some small changes into svn if I have time, but I am officially winding down and getting ready to go. So its unlikely this project will see any activity for the next two weeks or so.

So I will get back to warp once I return.

But I will document a few of the changes I have made this week:

I have officially gotten autopackage removal working, not the way I would have liked to, but I have done my best so far.... read more

Ok so I really need to get into a regular routine for submitting news onto this site, lets say about every two weeks or so for now and see how I go.

So with nothing further ado the progress made on Warp in the last two weeks.

Download only and Apply functions finally work correctly with a non-freezing GTK interface!

A primitive text based logging system has been implemented.

Wine EXE support has been removed since it messes up other packages, it was only a spur of the moment addition in the first place, however it might be implemented again once it can fully be diagnosed why it gets in the way.... read more

Unfortunately the project has had to be quiet with no explanation for some time, this is because the software was used as an idea for my final year project to get my degree.

Warp was changed in several fundamental ways, including a switch to python as a programming base, this has resulted in a faster development cycle but as yet there is still no 1.0 release, however GTK has been chosen as the GUI of choice and many improvements have been made.... read more

After what seems like an eternity I am finally able to dedicate time to warp again, two unexpected funerals and uni exams etc meant I basically had to go on a two month hiatus.

Work has already begun on trunk again and changes will start going in once I have configured monodevelop properly again.

It's good to be back.

After what seems like an eternity I am finally able to dedicate time to warp again, two unexpected funerals and uni exams etc meant I basically had to go on a two month hiatus.

Work has already begun on trunk again and changes will start going in once I have configured monodevelop properly again.

It's good to be back.

Warp 0.1.5 is out, logging is implemented as is a full featured security policy many bug fixes and other things have been applied. Work for 0.1.6 has started and will be out as soon as I can finish it. Warp is a massive challenge and the more I develop with Warp the more I learn, which at times it just feels like it's going to split my mind in half. If Warp is useful to even one person then it is worth it. If there is someone who is following the development of Warp and intends on using it when it is done, could you please contact me, just so I know?... read more

Warp now has it's own svn repo, I learned how to use svn all today, and now because of that warp now has a version control system. :D

Just run:
svn co http://warp.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/warp
to get the sources.

For serious use only use the tarballs, while I try to maintain a tree that should compile 99% of the time, this does not mean it will work. If you wanna hack on warp, by all means check out the source tree and get started.

For those of you who read the developer blog over on http://niadhmunro.livejournal.com/ will know I have been making slow but steady progress on 0.1.5, as it stands there is only now one feature to implement for 0.1.5 then it can be released.

Logging is what remains to be done, I have implemented a full security policy for warp, now making it much more secure, administrators can now rest safe in the knowledge they can block shell scripts from executing on their machine(s).... read more

The update code got re-written for 0.1.3 and for the 0.1.4 cycle changes to the code were made which required some functionality from updatefeeds to be moved elsewhere.

The code was pretty much totally tidied up, features were planned for 0.1.4 but I decided against them in favour of sticking to my versioning system.

Over all nothing really new here, but it's recommended you download the latest release, since it's more stable and much tidier.... read more

After many delays, countless stopping and starting and a total re-write of vUpdate( ) 0.1.3 is here!

See the change log for what's new, but needless to say this has been a LONG development, I imagine it could have been much shorter but I was trying to do most things my way.

There is a new menu feature, however it's not complete right now and states as much when you try and run it, that will appear in 0.1.4, lots of untidy code will be removed for 0.1.4, .4 is going to be marked as 'as stable as I can make it' so not so much with the new features.... read more

Please find the latest happening about Warp over at this blog here: http://niadhmunro.livejournal.com/

Also, 0.1.3 is almost ready, new update function has been written from the ground up and I'm tying up all the loose ends now and fixing any remaining bugs and we should actually have a release ready! Shock horror!

One of the major updates to the 0.1.X series will be the final feature to be added to warp to give it all the capabilities an RSS reader should have. The saving of GUIDs to a text file so Warp knows what items have been seen before. This will stop warp from attempting to install previously installed updates.

Now the code to do this is partially done, the GUID's are dumped to a text file, however new updates are not compared against the list of known GUIDs. ... read more

It's done and up, bugs fixed this time and everything!

I was poking around in MonoDevelop and found an option to export the project to a source archive, and tried using that this time. It does not appear to have included even the license information, so I will continue to use my own method for packaging the tarballs.

Anyways, I digress.

Enjoy.

As 0.1.1 was shipped with some pretty bad bugs which could crash the application, I have worked tirelessly to ensure those bugs are not present in 0.1.2, now, I HAVE fixed those bugs, I just don't want to introduce new bugs at this point, so I am going to spend some more time testing this time around and see if there's anything critical.

If so, I'll fix it, else I'll upload it for you to enjoy.

I hoped to have released 0.1.2 quickly, however 0.1.1 was shipped with a pretty major bug, well two bugs, but it's caused by the same thing. Progress with this bug has been slow, and painful, and I must admit not much has happened with it, and not for lack of trying.

As soon as this bug has been eliminated, I shall do a proper test on the program and release it as 0.1.2.

As promised Valkyrie 0.1.1 is now out. Work is now about to begin on 0.1.2, which will have a menu system of of some sort, dunno if it'll be text ncurses or something else entirely, but I feel that while everything should be able to be done by passing arguments to a program I also feel that the user should have an interactive prompt if they want to do more than one thing at once.

I expect this shouldn't take quite as long as this release did.... famous last words...

The 0.1.X series are the build up to the 0.2 release, the 0.2 release will be stable 0.3 will introduce new features etc, as has been mentioned before.

However, I have realized some new features will be inevitable, now I will try to keep them as few as possible, especially in 'stable' versions, and as stable as possible.

Anyways, the next release is 0.1.1 and will be available soon. Included in this release is the removal code, now feeds can be added and removed from within the program, there are a few bugs fixed which I am glad to see the back of, and the code is so much more tidier, also point of interest I have a developer blog here http://niadhmunro.livejournal.com/... read more

Warp is a recursive backronym for 'Warps An Rss Package-manager', it is a research project to see if Web2.0 can be used practically, and it can. Now for a practical application.

It's taken a long long time, but here it is, proof RSS feeds can be used as an application update source. Download it, test it, patch it, whatever. I'm a long way still from this being in practical use, but the basics are there.... read more

Warp will be split into two branches, Pegasus and Valkyrie, Pegasus will be the package installed Valkyrie will be the RSS package manager component and hopefully one day they will come back together. Pegasus for now is not under active development.

Valkyrie however can now have an RSS feed added to it to search for packages, download updates from feeds and very soon will be able to install said updates. ... read more

I was always taught that anything is possible in programming, so there has to be a solution to this problem I am having, I have found a way of including a payload into RSS, using the enclosure tag, this allows RSS readers to display multimedia content, it can't be that hard to adapt the idea to from multimedia to packages, I just need to learn how.

Which is the main issue, this is the main purpose of warp, and it's the main thing I am struggling with, go figure.... read more

Much progress has been made since the last post, support for multiple feeds has pretty much been implemented the update function needs to be tidied up a fair bit but, other than that things are well on the way.

A new class has been added with all the member functions being everything that has anything to do with the RSS feeds part of the program, this makes passing feed information between functions much easier and separates the non RSS feeds parts away allowing me to change one part without breaking the other.... read more

WarpCoreV2 as the component will be called from now on (unless the Mono project port the third version of the .Net environment in which case it'll be V3, but you get the idea) is the command line based RSS package update manager.

As of about 30 seconds ago VERY rudimentary RSS support was implemented, I have to work out a way of making this RSS support work with installing packages, but I am now one step closer to what this project aim's to achieve. ... read more

So for one thing or another I have been unable to do anything with Warp... until now.

Warp will be split up into smaller parts, the GUI based tool has been thrown out the window (for now) as the 1.X code was worthless. The new code already has features that we not programmed into previous versions.

There is nothing usable at this stage however so far the engine component that GUI's can be build on top of, now compiles under Windows and Linux and the program can be started with different arguments and these are handled in a safe manner.... read more

Just a quick update, last night I got a very basic RSS feed to load into warp, and believe I can use XPath to embed packages into an RSS feed rather easily by the looks of it, which is rather encouraging.

Neil

Ok I am back and so is warp, now we have nothing usable yet, there are LOTS of things needing done before we even have something working, so considering we are students with workloads don't be surprised if things are slow, however what we do have is a new GUI and have one of the scripts warp used to create replaced and implemented as a function not a script, which is a start.

There will be a screenshot of the new GUI soon, but it's not perfect things don't run as we would like them on start up etc, so that's one of things that I need to fix first.... read more