Upack.exe improvements

Guest

There are a few things that I would like to see improved in upack.exe.

There are a some cases where upack fails with unhandled exceptions. For example when I request a package that does not exist in "upack install" or if I try to pack a package from a source folder that does not exist with "upack pack".
Are you planning a NuGet version of upack? It would make it so much easier to integrate upack into our existing ecosystem. Right now I need to have a wrapper around upack.exe to call it from my .NET app.
There are a few other minor things that would just be quality of life improvements. How is your position on making the source of the client app available and open for pull requests? I would gladly help in implementing some of the things I have in mind.

cheers

Thomas

Product: ProGet
Version: 4.8.9

Guest

Thank you for the feedback; actually, UPack is open source, and we are definitely accepting pull requests for it. Overall, we're working towards open sourcing our full products as well; for now, you can actaully request access to our gitlab (product) code.

https://github.com/inedo/upack

That said, we'd love any help you can offer in improving this, because we think it has a lot of potential. A NuGet version, like a library? That's a good idea, and we hadn't considered it before. We'd be particularly interested to learn how you're using it as well.

By the way, something you might find of interest... virtual packages

Guest

Oh, sorry. That was my bad not checking github before asking. Thanks!

A few weeks ago we had a talk that ended in bringing up the concept of virtual packages (thanks for the heads-up!). That was because we are using upack to distribute additional packages during deployment / upgrade.

Now I am moving one step forward and I am evaluating to actually deploy the client itself of our product via upack. This is done from within the context of another .NET-App (think of it as an installer). So, right now, I am wrapping upack.exe in a class to call it from my code. If it came as a ready-to-use NuGet package, I would not have to deal with the following problems I am facing right now:

Checking if upack.exe is installed on the target machine. I'd like to avoid shipping upack.exe together with my code, if possible.
Passing parameters and values to an external process to execute my commands.
Therefore having no proper control over what errors happen (if any) and how to deal with them.

Thanks

Thomas

atripp

The NuGet library is definitely coming! Actually we wrote one for use in Romp, and will just ship that. We'll publish as a pre-release, and once we get it properly documented and whatnot, ship it. But it's fine to use now (the code is really simple).