Hard to believe Google Summer of Code 2009 is over already and that school will be starting up next week. I want to say thanks to Bertrand Cachet and Pierre-Jean Coudert for their support as mentors on WinLibre.

Our project has come a long ways. With some initial design hurdles past us, we were able to get hard at work creating a package system for Windows that would be both reliable and flexible. There are a lot more design issues with a package system on Windows than we had anticipated, especially with the vast amount of ways that applications are released to the public. We designed WinLibre to be extremely simple to package and release for developers without having to change the way they currently ship their releases.

I was tasked with the package creator. All in all it was a good end result, got a lot done and learned an indescribable amount of things. I was able to implement as much as possible without a few features from the other students in the project. We’ve all had our plates full and had some rough times but it’s about the love for open source and community when it comes down to it. Here are a list of things working in the package creator:

• CLI support
• wxPython GUI
• Initialize package
• Set package meta data
• Set install scripts
• Add files to package

A few things have yet to be completed such as package relationships (depends, recommends, etc), install script templates and examples, sample packages, and package submission to the repository. These features will be implemented in the future and I plan to continue contributing to this project.

Google Summer of Code has brought a lot of good experiences to many students, teaching them about community, open source, and even things about themselves. I want to thank Google for sponsoring such a wonderful program and to all those who participated!

For both Keryx and GSoC 2009′s WinLibre, we were in need of a Python port of dpkg’s version comparison algorithm. Instead of hacking together some new code, I decided to port dpkg’s algorithm straight from C++ to Python. The end result? A clean and simple algorithm that is capable of comparing quickly and accurately along with returning results in standard Python sorting function format (-1 for less than, 0 for equal, 1 for greater than). This function can be used on a list to sort versions with the [].sort() function. Very handy and being written in pure Python makes it an excellent choice for cross-platform apt tools like Keryx as well as apps like WinLibre who use the same versioning system as Debian.

Check out the code here: http://bitbucket.org/excid3/winlibre/src/tip/wpkg/vercmp.py

It is an accepted specification to use the RFC 822 standard for formatting names and email addresses. Widespread usage of RFC 822 means that we should definitely try to provide support for this in WinLibre’s metadata. Here’s an example formatted name/email combo in RFC 822:

John Smith <example@website.com>

This, however, will not work smoothly with our usage of XML formatting in our metadata documents. Read more »

There has been some confusion what a package management system needs to be capable of doing. I have outlined the usage of WinLibre from both an end user’s point of view as well as a developer’s point of view in this document to help explain how everything will work together.

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As a student in Google Summer of Code 2009, I was accepted to work on the WinLibre project. WinLibre is a package management system for Windows. Our task? To revive the project, abandoned 5 years ago in December of 2004. As part of the team of three student developers, I have been tasked to develop the package creator for WinLibre. I have a strong background in Linux over the past several years and have worked intimately with both deb and rpm based distributions. Debian based distros using the apt package system have always been a favorite of mine, so what better way to base WinLibre off of one of the most reliable and flexible package systems?
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