wpkg 0.7.2 available

wpkg 0.7.2 finally made it!

There were quite a few bugs to fix in 0.7.1 and 0.7.2 is already a huge improvement over 0.7.1.

The ChangeLog file will give you all the details, but the major bugs were in the compression/decompression code which would not properly handle all cases. This new version should not fail anymore. It was tested with many more packages and some really large ones (i.e. over 250Mb in size) so the compression code has now been stressed. I also write a unit test to test that code and had no problems even with sizes equal to the buffer boundaries.

For those of you who would like to create tools to read and write Debian packages, a dynamic version of the libraries is now available. This works both, under MS-Windows (.DLL) and under Linux (.so). Even the bz2 library ends up being linkable directly from its DLL (without having to search for the function pointers as the default library offers.)

wpkg is also better at testing control file fields as it verifies many more of them. The result is a more secure environment. One field I would like to specifically bring to your attention is the Distribution field. This really helps in avoiding installing a package from the wrong distribution. wpkg verifies that only packages from the same distribution are installed in a target system (note though that this feature is turned off by default.)

Another cool feature is the deb2html which you can run against a distribution directory to generate a website of all your packages and a corresponding index. Very easy to use, the tool makes it much easier to see what depends on what and how many versions of each package you have.

You can download and review the ChangeLog of 0.7.2 at this address: https://sourceforge.net/projects/unigw/files/wpkg/0.7.2/