appy

I’ve been sporadically working on a little command line installer for OSGeo4W, called apt. It is based on cyg-apt, a command line apt-get-like installer for cygwin byJan Nieuwenhuizen. I currently have two forks. One for o4w alone, which I’ve renamed apt, and the second for cygwin alone, which I’ve left as cyg-apt. Forking is not a good idea when there is so much in common, so I’m going to try and bring them together. One app, two installers. Neither name fits this new job so I’m going to use appy for the time being. It will have to change eventually as there’s another, much bigger, python project with the appy name, but I don’t want to spend hours agonizing over a name. Again.

The appy series of posts will chronicle my misadventures as I try and teach myself programming by making this small tool a little bit more useful. To me anyway!

Matt’s cyg-apt: my only claim to (in)famy here is converting system calls to md5sum, tar, etc. to pure python. So now the only pre-requisite is python. All the real work and intelligence in this program is a result of Jan’s work.

I created a standalone exe of the o4w version which can be used to install o4w from scratch, but at 2.5mb it’s a little big for what it actually does.