(.deb/.bz) : Adding .rpm files would sell a lot

[bc_for_life]

I note that BC v3.2 has added support for bzip2, bzipped tar archives , Debian .deb packages. ( .bz , .bz2 , and .deb )

That is hot !

I want to compare these types of files, using my MSWIN install. (I do not have a Linux install).

Additionally,
adding support for Redhat RPM ( Very similiar to "cpio" files) would sell a lot of products !

What do you think about that proposal.

Best Wishes to ScooterSoftware.

[Zoë]

We added support for RPMs on Linux in v3.1.0, and the Windows version does support bzip2 and bzipped tars. The RPM and DEB support currently use the 'rpm' and 'ar' utilities to do the heavy lifting though, so adding Windows support would require re-implementing them from scratch.

All is not lost, however. Another thing we added in 3.2 was support for Total Commander "packer" plugins, and there are ones for both RPM and DEB available at http://www.totalcmd.net/directory/packer.html. The help hasn't been updated yet, but there's a bit of a writeup on installing them on the beta page.

[chrroe]

Hi everyone,

motivated by this thread I tried the TC-Packer-Plugins feature for RPMs under Windows. Loading a single RPM in the Folder Compare seems to work with "RPM(+cpio) 1.5".

But when I try to compare two different versions of the same RPM I get several crashes. I will send the automated reports and some sample RPMs later this day ...

Bye
Christoph

[Zoë]

Thanks for the feedback Christoph.

Apparently the CPIO plugin (used by the RPM one) isn't thread-safe, so loading two archives at once messes it up. I was able to work around the issue by loading two single-sided sessions first, and scrolling through them with the CRC column visible. That was enough to get everything into the cache, so when I switched to comparing the files to each other it didn't access the plugin again.

In any case, I've contacted the author of Total Commander to see if plugins are supposed to support multiple threads. If they are I'll help update the CPIO plugin; if not we'll work around the issue in BC in the next release.

[bc_for_life]

Craig of Scooter writes:
{The RPM and DEB support currently use the
'rpm' and 'ar' utilities to do the heavy lifting though
, so adding Windows support would require re-implementing them from scratch.}

Thank you Craig. Regarding "rpm" and "ar", there may be a much simplier solution.
That is, I have a counter-proposal/suggestion.

Can one configure BC to simply use the indespensible/free Cygwin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ ) ?

Cygwin is Linux. It will always be there.
Cygwin is indespensible and is so good, I'd even put it ahead of BC as a necessity.

Here is what my DOS box give me, on my MSWIN-XP box:


C:\> which rpm2cpio
/usr/bin/rpm2cpio

C:\> which rpm
/usr/bin/rpm

C:\> which ar
/usr/bin/ar

What do you think ? A free, natural, and native solution. All we need is a configuration GUI ...

[Zoë]

Unfortunately, when I was testing the DEB support, the versions of ar included with both cygwin and GnuWin32 were buggy. The next version will have the Total Commander support fixed. I've verified that the RPM/CPIO/DEB plugins will work fine, so for now I think adding extra configuration options for this would be redundant. That said, we are working on a few other things that could benefit from Cygwin, so if we make those configurable I'll consider this too.