Crunch Time with Surprises

It almost sounds like I'm eating Lucky Charms, but it's true. 1.5 weeks until school starts and already I'm getting my mind into that mode. I've gone into testing mode for Paladin so that, hopefully, it will be ready to ship by the time that school time hits. I've found a few weird things, but there's just a lot of stuff to test and use day-to-day. I had plenty of chance to break things in this weekend. How?

I spent Friday night in a daze, just playing around with unzip, curious if there is a way to create self-extracting zip files in Haiku and Linux. It turns out that it is. Literally it is just a matter of tacking on a zipfile to the end of an stub program which more or less runs unzip on itself. This led to a realization that hit me like a lightning bolt while I lay in bed early yesterday morning. For a while I've had code that I wrote for a packaging system for BeOS / Zeta / Haiku sitting on my hard drive, collecting proverbial dust because I couldn't figure out the best way to store the files. It was a large percentage of the way to completion, too. This connection put me into coding overdrive yesterday and I spent a generous amount of time on it tonight, too. The result? PSfx. Of course, this isn't news if you subscribe to the checkin RSS feed for Paladin. Natch.

PSfx is a package building app which works very much like the PackageBuilder app which is bundled in the BeOS 5 Development Tools. The difference is that, when finished, it will work *much* better than PackageBuilder and won't require any extra tools. The new format uses ZIP compression leading to smaller file sizes than the equivalent for SoftwareValet packages. Like Paladin, it has a scripting-friendly command line interface, perfect for integrating into other build systems or hacking together a quick shell script to automate the building and packaging of a project. The build scripts that it uses are a similar format to the Paladin project files, which makes them friendly toward source control and also easy to read and write even with just a regular text editor. Also, even though the executables will run only on certain OSes, it will be possible to build, say, a Haiku GCC4 package from my Zeta install.

All of this is not to say that it's finished, however. While the install engine and command-line interface are mostly finished, the GUI still needs more work. There are some bugs I need to fix and some other miscellaneous stuff needs done. While PSfx certainly won't be ready for the Paladin 1.3 release, Paladin's next release, in theory, will use this new install system. While these self-extracting packages probably won't be as elegant a solution as what the other Haiku developers will be coming up with at the proper time, it sure beats waiting a few more years for decent software distribution tools.