Ketarin is a package manager for Windows operating systems... because, apparently they haven't got their act together yet. They must be too busy couting thier money or maybe designing a propritary protocol to replace an open standard that already exists; except they won't (they couldn't possibly) do the peer-review, QA, and hardening that an open standard naturally gets. If you let them do that and then "sell" you security products too... congratulations, you just got raped by M$.
I digress. Ketarin is awesome. You can find the original project here and their forum here. This is a fork of their software w/ no official connections to the original developers at the moment, but I hope to faithfully implement their intentions where I make modifications to the source.
Beyond moving away from sharing bundled archives as a means to distribute the source code I had some snags that I think I could remove and have the process of building from source trivial for the next Ketarin fan.
- Documentation & Wiki
- Ketarin Tutorial - Italian by MegaLab.it
- Ketarin Tutorial - English by deranjer
- Tips and Tutorials on the Forum
Original source downloaded from Ketarin website via the author provided link in the second paragraph under the section entitled "What is it all about?" download source
Pre-compiled binaries can also be found on the site. As of 2012-08-05 the website reports the current version of Ketarin as 1.6.0.434; this does indeed match the pre-compiled binaries.
After decompressing the source files into a folder of their own under my development directory I opened the ketarin.proj file with VS2008 and as an initial smoke test ran the commands (from the VS2008 menu bar) "Build->Clean Solution" followed by "Build->Build Solution" (or equivently F7)
Immediatly there were build errors due to a reference to source code that was not included w/ the Ketarin sources; the source code for CDBurnerXP, which is indeed referenced by the Ketarin project as being parallel to the Ketarin parent source directory. i.e. "...\CDBurnerXP\trunk[...]" Note: the ".." double-period signifies to go back one directory from the current directory "." signified by the single-period, and my use of the ellipses (the triple-period) is to show that the actuall content goes on, but I trunkated it here.
I didn't notice until now that the download URL for the Ketarin source files is actually under the CDBurnerXP dowmain; furthermore the Ketarin website makes the comment up front that it, Ketarin, was merely created as a supporting component to the priemier application CDBurnerXP. Ketarin, as it turns out, has grown it's own loyal follers interested soley in the functionality offered by Ketarin all by itself.
I posted in the Ketarin formus asking about the development, maintenance, and future hosting/distribution plans for Ketarin. The post was titled "Compiling Ketarin from Source" posted around 14:04 GMT-6 in the General Discussion section of the forum
Let's check on that forum posting...
No Bueno. I went to check up on my post from earlier today. I can see it cited as a recent topic, but after clicking on the link to view the topic the Ketarin Forum crashes with a 500 HTTP response code.
The requested URL "[...]" was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Maybe they were updating the site, because things appear to be in better shape now. Actually, it's up and down. Hmmm.... well, anyway. My forum post can be seen here: Post: Compiling Ketarin from source
No responses yet; `tis no matter, I proceed on my own.
There is something going on with both the ketarin.org and CDBurnerXP.se domains; they both worked earlier today, but just can't pull it together at the moment. So, I did some poking around to see what cached files or other resources I might be able to turn up in the meantime.
I don't think that this page is meant for "us" the site visitors. I think it is for the administrator, but maybe not. At a glance the exposed API might be intentionally provided, but if not I would say this might be an avenue that has given the server a case of the HTTP 500's. See the exposed functionality here.
- ketarin.GetMostDownloadedApplications()
- ketarin.GetApplications()
- ketarin.GetSimilarApplications()
- ketarin.GetUpdatedApplications()
- ketarin.GetApplication()
- ketarin.SaveApplication()
(array) ketarin.GetMostDownloadedApplications() Returns a list of the most often downloaded applications. The number of apps is currently 50.
(array) ketarin.GetApplications([(string) searchSubject]) Gets all applications matching a search criteria (application name or GUID)
(array) ketarin.GetSimilarApplications((string) searchSubject, (string) appGuid) Gets all applications matching a search criteria (application name) except for the application given in the second parameter. - searchSubject: - appGuid: the application to ignore
(array) ketarin.GetUpdatedApplications((array) applications) Gets the XML of all applications that have been apssed as argument and have been updated (according to the updatedAt information of the arguments).
(array) ketarin.GetApplication((integer) shareId) Returns the data of a particular application by its server ID.
(integer) ketarin.SaveApplication((string) XML, (string) authorGuid) Adds an application to the database or updates it. - xml: Serialized application as XML - authorGuid: UID of the author. When updating applications, it must be identical to the one used when adding the application.
Seems mostly harmless except for the last call that writes to a DB. That and the fact that php may be the worst thing to ever happen to webapp/server security. Well, I'll come back to this when I have more time.
Google doesn't appear to have any cached versions of Ketarin's website; that would probably be due to the server requesting NOT to be cahced. Hmmm....
Well, the internet archive does have some snapshots of the site and it appears to be roughly what I was looking at earlier today. The declared application version is still decalred to be the same and that page is almost 2 yr. old.
I am really only interested in Ketarin, but it might be easier to simply add the missing source code for the CDBurnerXP application as opposed to sugically removing the references to that external project.
Hmmm... well, maybe the CDBurnerXP source is not available. I thought that it might be, but I don't see it yet and the site is going through the same error scenario that is happening to the Ketarin site. I hope they are just working on the site tonight or something.
Well, surgically removing the references (from within the Ketarin project) to the external project (CDBurnerXP) might be the only option afterall. Let's get to it.
As far as I am aware Ketarin does not depend on CDBurnerXP, so the first modification made to the source tree is to remove the reference to that external application. Right-click on the "CDBurnerXP" folder in VS2008's "Solution Explorer" Window, a context menu will be activated, and then select "Exclude from Project".
The folder melts away with no complaint and now we rebuild the solution; I prefer to "clean" followed by a "build" to ensure the full run through, especially since we are still smoke testing and trying to figure out which way is up.
More output is spewed by VS2008 this time around than the first attempt, but the ultimate outcome is still a failure. Scroll to the first line of output in the VS2008 "Output" window.
The first line mentions the .NET runtime v3.5; I'll have to verify, but I think I am running v4.0 and I do not know the backwards compatibility issues with the .NET runtime. I'll have to look into that. First, a little closer look at the error message.
Just beyond the first error message, where the .NET runtime v3.5 is mentioned, there are 4 references to the "CDBurnerXP" module in source files. Let's start with that before taking the .NET runtime clue seriously.
Find all "CDBurnerXP;", Subfolders, Find Results 1, "Entire Solution"
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\ApplicationJob.cs(13):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\DbManager.cs(8):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Forms\ApplicationJobDialog.cs(12):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Forms\ChooseAppsToInstallDialog.cs(13):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Forms\ImportFromDatabaseDialog.cs(9):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Forms\InstallingApplicationsDialog.cs(11):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Forms\SettingsDialog.cs(12):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Hotkey.cs(5):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\MainForm.cs(30):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Program.cs(23):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\Updater.cs(11):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\UrlVariable.cs(10):using CDBurnerXP;
- [...]\Ketarin\Ketarin-src\WebClient.cs(6):using CDBurnerXP;
Matching lines: 13 Matching files: 13 Total files searched: 423
13 files reference the module through the "using" directive. Let's start by commenting all those references out.
Then clean and build again.