[wpkg-users] Env variables within WPKG vars in <check /> statements do not resolve

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Chris,

Chris Allen wrote:
> Stefan, thanks for the fix.  I applied the fix and tested it, it worked
> and so far I haven't had any problems.

As written it's now part of WPKG 1.1.1 too.


> One of the changes I noticed in 1.1 the prepending @COMSPEC /C on
> commands.  Since I recently started using WPKG and posting to this group
> I missed the discussion on this, but I have to wonder why
> 
> cmd = '%COMSPEC% /s /c "' + cmd + '"';
> 
> wasn't used instead.  Does this have some unintentional side effects? 
> Obviously it would break some install scripts out there, but so did the
> addition of @comspec /c.  Not that I'm complaining, I think this is a
> good move, I just hate having to keep track of those special
> circumstances when I need to wrap the whole command in double quotes.

This code has been reverted in WPKG 1.1.1 again. It seems any "solution" with
Windows tools seems to break something else. %COMSPEC% wrapping is terrible in
terms of correct quoting and could cause problems with different
Windows-Versions. As WPKG runs on Windows 9x up to Windows 7 this is an
important point.
On the other side the broken STDOUT/STDERR flushing in WSH prevents correct
handling using WSH facilities.
So my decision was to revert the change. This works unless a program prints more
than 4kB of data to STDOUT/STDERR. This is is very unusual anyway and in case an
installer prints so much it makes sense to redirect the output to a file
(log-file) for later reference anyway.
So WPKG 1.1.1 and newer will not try to work-around the problem any more.



> I wrote a tiny little AutoIT3 wrapper around wpkg.js to throw up some
> GUI buttons for commonly used functions and I have found very handy when
> testing.  And my Jr. admins like it when they want to quickly check
> what's installed on someone's machine.  Anyway I figured that maybe I
> should post it on here just in case someone else finds it useful.  Save
> it as a .au3 file and place it into the same directory as wpkg.js
[snip]

Thanks. I will have a look at it and eventually include it in the 3rd parties
tools. However I would ask you to create some small README which explains a few
things:

- What is the tool doing (overview)
- Prerequirements
- Installation/compilation
- Usage
- Some examples (use-cases)
- Known limitations
- technical details
- contact information
- license


br,
Rainer