Hi all, I am glad to announce the release of a new version of the FreeDOS network package manager: FDNPKG v0.95 !
This release is the result of a few days of my work. I cleaned up the code pretty extensively, rewriting some of the biggest modules, added a few cool features and fixed a bunch of bugs. Some of the nice features are: support for gopher repositories (gopher is so much nicer than http!), and support for LZMA packages. Although I wouldn't recommend using LZMA archives on a regular basis. Even if the compression is about 20-25% better than deflate, it requires huge amounts of memory at decompressing time (or a swap-capable DPMI service). You need ~24M of RAM to be able to decompress an LZMA stream - such amounts of RAM are often not available on oldish DOS machines. However, it might make sense to use LZMA for (big) packages that we know the user will have enough RAM (eg. 3D games...). Below is the exact changelog of this new FDNPKG release. FDNPKG v0.95 [11 Jul 2013] - [fix] when updating a package, the new candidate is downloaded and checked before the current package is removed from the system (before we could end with our package being removed and none installed if the download failed on the new one), - [fix] remote package is not downloaded anymore if it's already installed (unless we want to update it), - [new] replaced the embedded UNZIP kludge by my own unzip implementation, - [new] replaced the embedded htget kludge by my own, lighter & simpler http implementation, - [new] the directory %DOSDIR%\packages is created automatically when installing the first package, - [new] the 'install' action do not ask what package version to install, and installs the most recent one if it's possible to figure out the latest version automatically (otherwise asks the user as before), - [new] added gopher support for online repositories storage, - [new] added support for LZMA-compressed packages, - [new] added a progress feedback when downloading files, so in case of big packages taking a long time to download, the user don't think anymore that fdnpkg freezed, - [new] added the possibility to update all packages in the system to latest version at once (if newer versions are available), via 'fdnpkg update', - [new] renamed the 'showinstalled' action to 'listlocal', as the latter is shorter/faster to type (but 'showinstalled' still works for backward compatibility), - [new] refactored the whole networking code to make it much easier to integrate other tcp/ip stacks in the futur (mTCP maybe, if it makes it into the 32bit world?). If you are already a happy fdnpkg user (and using the v0.94), you can make it update itself via the command 'fdnpkg update fdnpkg'. The main website of FDNPKG has changed, now it's hosted here: http://fdnpkg.sourceforge.net/ I'd like also to use this occasion to call for volunteers. Any package management system is useless without actual packages, and it's really hard for me to both develop/test/maintain FDNPKG and do packaging for it. If you are finding fdnpkg useful, know how to handle a zip archiver, and have some spare time, please consider giving a hand to FreeDOS by contributing packages. To dump the current list of available packages, one could use 'fdnpkg vsearch'. Not only core FreeDOS programs/tools are concerned, but any DOS program/game that is a) useful and b) compliant with the open-source/libre principles. cheers, Mateusz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
