new AmiUpdate 2.48 (01/17/2021)

The dev who wrote this doesn't seem to understand how XML works so it doesn't surprise me he's fixed the bug but introduced another. I am amused however that he finally fixed a bug after arguing with me for months that it wasn't a bug at all.

@NinjaCyborg

XML is horrendous for parsing, it doesn't surprise me it causes problems. Why people insist on using it for config files instead of something more appropriate is beyond me.

Hint: if you don't have a complex application which necessitates nesting configuration options (and even if you do there are other solutions), you shouldn't be wasting your time using XML. There are plenty of other options, such as IFF, ToolTypes, INI, JSON, YAML. The first two in particular are preferred and easy to parse for Amiga applications.

@Chris

ToolTypes are, inmh, one the best, easiest to use and user-friendliest settings solution i've ever seen on any platform.

You can even save precious development time *not* writing a prefs editor.

Plus, it shows that your user base doesn't need to be pampered and can think for themselves...a good readme and off you go.

Yeah it's a real shame that the 'official' system update mechanism is so poorly designed and poorly supported. Although Updater isn't much better.

That OS4 uses XML here and there betrays it's early 2000s origins. XML was cool for a little while, before people realised JSON was fine for 99% of applications.

Sure, Mac uses plist XMLs but at least Apple employs devs who know how to encode white space properly!

@Raziel

As an official component a Prefs editor is pretty essential. But it should probably have written the config in IFF PREF format like most of the other Prefs editors (excluding some of the newer ones which also use XML as NinjaCyborg noted).

The bonus is IFF parsing through iffparse.library is quite similar to how XML parsers work, but simpler, and probably both less memory intensive (the parser alone is smaller) and quicker.

@NinjaCyborg

If AmigaOS used XML across the board and we had an xmlparse.library which was simple to use and included with the OS - properly encoding and decoding strings and setting types etc - then I'd be less against it.

But instead we have a mishmash of open source libraries, none of which are particularly easy to use, and developers who aren't familiar with them or XML (I include myself in that*) but want to use XML as apparently it was cool around the early 2000s, even though it isn't really suitable for the intended task.

* I've never been much keen on XML, and every time I've had to try to deal with it it has been difficult to work with.

@All
There are new big updates to amiupdate. installed them now over yesterday's amiupdate and while all installs-updates fine at the end i just have a GR from "RebootDaemon" so had to reboot manually. All seems fine and the crash in rebootdaemon seems didn't cause any bad mess.

On one of my partitions, I chose to not auto-update AmiUpdate at the start, but wait and let it list all updates.

It showed both the main, full AmiUpdate update and two separate updates for the prefs program and the library, respectively. When I let it update all three in the same go, I ended up with corrupt (truncated? at least shorter) versions of the prefs program and the library.

Trying to scan (after rebooting) created a GR with a stack trace with lots of expat.library addresses in the stack.

Then I replaced the two modules with the same ones from the main AmiUpdate archive, and all is now well.

So a general warning: If you also get those two updates presented, don't accept them. Only install the main AmiUpdate archive, then the next run will not present the others, since those versions are already installed (in complete and healthy variants).

Best regards,

Niels

P.S. Disclaimer: I could of course have gotten corrupt downloads of those two archives due to network hiccups, but I doubt it, it's not that likely to have happened to two out of three downloads right after each other.

@nbache

Seems to happen almost every time there's an AmiUpdate new item. The dude who manages it doesn't configure them properly on the server leading to corrupt nonsense downloads. Apparently he's never heard of 'testing'