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Re: fund features

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2018 12:00 am
by zipmagic
Our first commercially funded contribution is nearing completion here:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=372&p=1026#p1026

@cadgis - what was it you needed done yourself?

Maybe we can help out...

Re: fund features

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2019 1:39 pm
by cadgis
Happy new year everyone,

we need a way to make diffs. Something like "wimapply archive.wim 4 different-from=1" where 1 and 4 are images and different-from would tell to take both new and modified files (in image 4 compared to image 1). If we do an update on the test computer and it appears to work after 2 weeks of testing and we want to deploy it, but it's just a .ini file that was tweaked or whatever, reapplying the GBs of the whole archive on over 100 computers is way too much strain for the network and it also erases the local modifications made. So with something like a cherry pick. You would keep all the local "commits" and only apply the diff between image x and image y.

Re: fund features

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 12:58 pm
by cadgis
@synchronicity Or maybe some hints where to go in the code for a feature like that. If it was Python, I would just add a "for glob in image1: if glob not in (image2+image3): extract glob" for a command like "wim apply archive.wim 1 different-from=2,3". I guess in C it's a but more convoluted, but shouldn't be that hard?

Re: fund features

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2019 9:14 am
by WithinRafael
synchronicity wrote: Sat Dec 22, 2018 4:43 am Yes, I just don't have as much time for wimlib anymore, what with a full time job and more important open source projects to work on. I'd like for more developers to get involved with wimlib. But indeed, for someone to make meaningful contributions they need to actually be qualified and not just some random person hired on a freelance programmers website.

There isn't documentation for developing wimlib per se, beyond the instructions for how to build it. But I think an actually good developer, especially one experienced with C programming and filesystems, could figure most things out pretty well. I've tried to make things clean and logical, follow established conventions, and leave helpful comments.

Logistics-wise, I don't currently list an official way to submit patches for review. But if someone were actually to be doing substantial, genuinely good work I'd be glad to arrange to review and/or apply patches via email, Github, or any other way that makes sense.

Unfortunately I don't think wimlib is widely used enough for a foundation to provide adequate funding. Even open source projects that are much more essential, e.g. zlib and OpenSSL, tend to be very underfunded.

So I'm afraid that if you can't convince me to implement your feature soon enough (considering that due to limited time I have to prioritize based on how many people want the feature, how easy it is including the future maintenance cost, whether reasonable arguments exist that the feature request is misguided, and other factors), the best hope is probably to take it up yourself. And if you have questions I'd encourage you to post them here on the forums, where you might be able to get some other people involved too.
It's not very easy for other devs to get involved here, have you considered uploading to GitHub/GitLab?

Re: fund features

Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2019 9:34 pm
by synchronicity
It's not very easy for other devs to get involved here, have you considered uploading to GitHub/GitLab?
To reduce the barrier to entry I just went ahead and uploaded the source to Github here. So people can create pull requests there if they want. (And I will keep it in sync with the repo here at git://wimlib.net/wimlib.)