[wpkg-users] WPKG Development Status

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Zach,

On 21.03.2011 19:37, Zach Musselman wrote:
> Is WPKG development dead?  Would be nice to have more regular client
> and server releases.  Would also like a web gui to manage installs.
> WPKGexpress is not being developed on.
> Current state makes it hard to check 100+ machines for what installed
> and what did not.  Would even pay a small amount to have a more robust
> server setup.

No. Neither community nor development is dead. However nobody can deny that WPKG
reached some level of "maturity" which makes it difficult to extend it as a kind
of "private" project.

Reasons are:
- WPKG features cover most use-cases in small and medium enterprises. Large
enterprises are pretty unlikely to use WPKG.

- Integrating into large enterprises requires test environments and effort
(spent by volunteers) as well as software licenses.

- The amount of users for such advanced features would be small and therefore
test effort does not easily justify spending limited resources on features which
are used by a small user base.


I personally see strong demand in the following area:
- Interface for package management as well as machine state tracking. Well
WPKGExpress and inventory tools might help here as well as publishing wpkg.xml
to a public server (see wiki) but for some admins it's not sufficient. In my
environment I've faced both, admins which like XML files and others who ware
completely unable to use it unless there is a dummy-GUI presenting XML content
in user-friendly format.

- Client which displays more information about WPKG state (logon delay, status
output). Well wpkg-gp seems to work on such issues but limits imposed by
Microsoft make it hard to do it properly. Honestly I didn't even use it yet.
Still using WPKG-Client on Win7 installations.


I am mainly working on wpkg.js and I am not an exception... Recently I've been
very busy with other tasks (yes, sometimes the job I earn money with has higher
priority than a community project, my apologizes for this). However I have some
changes and enhancements on my task list. Some good fixes have been provided to
Bugzilla too. I am looking forward to include them soon into official wpkg.js.
If there would be any critical bug which affects lots of users I would of course
try fix it immediately.

This is by no means an excuse for "slow" progress, but it gives some reasons.
The best you can do is of course to either file bug reports or discuss on the
list. For many things there are already solutions available.

br,
Rainer