Ste Packaging

The latest “Community Sources” package changes the location of my repository’s XML file. Instead of downloading it directly from my site, it will download it from a world-wide caching system. Not only will this eliminate nearly all the traffic to my main server, but it should update faster, for you, as you will get it from the cache closest to you.

Right now, the XML file will age out of the cache after 12 hours. This means that if I add/update a package, you might not see it for as long as 12 hours, no matter how many times you might manually refresh. Once I’m satisfied that this is working ok, I will tweak the settings so that it ages out of the cache much quicker - probably down to 1 hour instead of 12.

Thanks again, to Nullriver, for helping me test this and for updating the “Community Sources” package for me! My thanks to Nate True for suggesting the caching system to me, too!

If this goes well, I will investigate caching the zip files, too.

UPDATE: I have changed the timeout from 12 hours to 30 minutes. So, if I add or update a package you should see it in 30 minutes or less now.

-ste

Please upgrade to Installer.app 3.0b9 as soon as possible. Nullriver has released this update to try and help reduce the traffic on my site so that DreamHost doesn’t shut it down.

What they did, was increase the refresh timeout from 30 minutes to 24 hours. So now, when you run Installer.app, it will not automatically refresh unless it has been more than 24 hours since it last refreshed. Unless people start manually refreshing more (please don’t!), this should drasticly reduce traffic to my main server, as people upgrade to the new version.

My thanks go out to Nullriver for this update!

UPDATE: While I was waiting for this update to come out, I discovered a bug in Installer.app’s MovePath and CopyPath commands. I reported it to Nullriver and this release fixes that bug, in addition to changing the refresh timeout, as described above.

The bug was that, in this XML code:

MovePath
/var/root/Media/Labyrinth/settings.plist
/var/root/Library/Labyrinth/settings.plist

if the “/var/root/Library/Labyrinth” directory didn’t exist, Installer.app would not create it, as it should have. The behavior was the same if you changed MovePath to CopyPath. This bug did not occur when the source was the package being installed.

-ste

I would like to take a moment to welcome a new repository to the folds of the Trusted “Community Sources” repositories: the ModMyiFone (MMi) repository.

I worked with them and Nullriver to get them added as the newest member of the CS team and I’m sure they will be a valuable member of our community.

Update your Community Sources package, in Installer.app, to get access to MMi’s packages, now.

-ste

The latest Installer.app, released today by ‘lg’ at Nullriver, is version 3.0b7. You should update to this as soon as you can. It fixes the following issues:

• incorrect handling of symbolic links in packages
• crashes when downloading very large packages
• problems when unpacking very large packages
• problems handling packages zipped up on Windows

-ste

A lot of folks were having trouble installing the “BSD Subsystem” package (v1.5) via Installer.app today, from the Nullriver repository. As a temporary measure, I put up an alternate copy of it in my repository and people started downloading it.

Some of those people installed it, because it looked like and update, even though it really wasn’t - it just installed the same thing on top of itself, for them.

And then I started getting email about how the ‘vi’ command was broken after people applied the update. So, I took down the package and started investigating. This shouldn’t have been happening, as it was literally the same zip file as they would download from the other site.

A quick ‘ls’ immediately showed the problem: the new version of Installer.app doesn’t appear to handle symbolic links in the package’s zip file and it trashes them. Fortunately, I think there are only three in that package. You can easily see if you are affected or not. First, ssh into your iPhone and run the following:

cd /usr/bin
ls -l more nano vi

If the output looks similar to this, then you are ok:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 10 23:07 more -> less
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 10 23:07 nano -> pico
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Oct 10 23:07 vi -> vim

If, however, it looks similar to this, then your symlinks are hosed:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 24 21:53 more
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 24 21:53 nano
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Oct 24 21:53 vi

If that’s the case, you can easily fix it by running these commands:

rm more nano vi
ln -s less more
ln -s pico nano
ln -s vim vi

Now you should be all set.

I have reported this apparent bug to Nullriver.

UPDATE: This will also be a problem for anyone who installed the BSD Subsystem via Installer.app 3.0 , at any time.

UPDATE: This bug is fixed in Installer.app 3.0b7. Also fixed: problems downloading & unpacking large packages and  an inability to handle packages zipped up on Windows. You should update to this release as soon as you can.

-ste