Release Notes

• Pacman-3.29, Jul 09, 2009
  • Fixed a problem with -allow any-platform pointed out by Asoka De Silva.
  • Added am-TRIUMF and TRIUMF symbolic names for Asoka.
• Pacman-3.28, May 20, 2009
  • Change update behavior so that if a package failed to update, Pacman ends with an error rather than trying to recover.
  • Give an error instead of handing for the obsolete timeErrorMaximum atom.
  • Added the BIRN symbolic cache name for J.P. Navarro of ANL.
  • Improve which atom, code contributed by Scot Kronenfeld of U.W.
  • Added @@PLATFORM@@ macro for VDT, code contributed by Scot Kronenfeld of U.W.
  • Bug fix in shellout.log output, code contributed by Scot Kronenfeld.
  • Improve perlVersion atom, code by Scot Kronenfeld.
  • Add -arch switch and associated config file for VDT, code by Scot Kronenfeld.
  • Refine detection of MacOS versions for VDT, code by Scot Kronenfeld.
  • Remove warning messages which occur for Python 2.6.
  • Fix "lazy Package" message when a package is not found.
  • End with an error message for Python 3.0.
  • Added -allow any-platform to ignore the platform used when creating an installation. Suggested by Asoka De Silva.
• Pacman-3.26, June 10, 2008
  • Code speedups provided by Alain Roy are included.
  • Improvements made to "flickering" default output.
  • Improved errors when using Pacman in an installation where you don't have read access to the installation (thanks to Marco Mambelli).
  • Fixed bug which occured if perl is in the installers path but perl -v returns with an error (thanks to Scot Kronenfeld for pointing this out).
  • Patch: added the fact that IFIC-SL-4 is a clone of SL-4 at the request of Javier Sanchez Martinez.
• Pacman-3.25, April 22, 2008
  • Pacballs may now be installed in existing installations (thanks to Stan, Alessandro & Xin of ATLAS for the suggestion).
  • Pacballs now ignore the platform when they install allowing for the possiblity of easy installation of pacballs many years into the future when current OSs won't be available.
  • Pacball scripts are simplified and adjusted with the view towards possible installation many years in the future when current OSs may not be available.
  • If you're managing a cache and put a file 'error.txt' in it, the contents of this file appear at the end of any Pacman error message if one of your packages fails to install. This let's you deliver custom messages to people installing your software. Thanks to the VDT guys for the suggestion.
  • option('error:MESSAGE') lets you customize error messages for individual packages.
  • Added support for Fedora 8 at Alessandro de Salvo's suggestion.
  • Added support for Ubuntu 8 at Marian Klein's suggestion.
  • The freedisk atom now assumes that there is a large amount of free disk space on platforms where freedisk does not work properly (including at least Mac-G4 and some virtual machines). Thanks to Isabel Trigger and Austin Napier for pointing out the problem.
  • Fix bug where detection of wget wasn't working on some OSs including OS/X. Thanks to John Kewley and Alain Roy for reporting the problem.
• Pacman-3.24, February 27, 2008
  • Fix a bug introduced in 3.22 causing a "contact Pacman headquarters" error message when trying to remove a package which doesn't exist. The error is harmless other than giving the incorrect error. Thanks to Asoka De Silva for reporting the problem.
• Pacman-3.23, February 4,2008
  • Fix a benign bug introduced in 3.22. The bug caused a package A to be unremovable if B depends on A and is updated so that B no longer depends on A.
• Pacman-3.22, January 17, 2008
  • Improved error messages when attempting to remove a package that is depended on by other packages in an installation. Thanks to Scot Kronenfeld for noticing the problem.
  • Use -allow tar-overwrite when pacballs are executed. This is particularly useful for ATLAS. Thanks to Martijn Gosselink for pointing this out.
  • Improved http error messages.
  • Improve behavior of -allow no-http-cache when used with squids. Thanks to Steve Timm for the reminder of this issue.
  • Improve error message on ^C during download.
  • Trust and tar-overwrite questions are now "y/n/yall".
• Pacman-3.21, August 22, 2007
  • Fixed a bug in the setup pointed out by Alain Roy. The bug caused setup commands to be put into setup.csh and setup.sh even if the setup atom was not reached in the installation.
  • Made clone platforms equivalent
  • Improved error message if -http-proxy is used before an installation exists.
  • Fixed -pretend-platform so that it issues an error message if it's not the first command. Thanks to Michael Thomas for pointing this out.
  • Allow extraneous slashes in URLs.
• Pacman-3.20, August 21, 2007
  • Move LDG cache for Gregory Mendell.
  • Add date to pacball output file name.
  • Renamed am-UM at the request of Edward Diehl.
  • Add IFIC-SL platform as requested by Javier Sanchez Martinez.
  • Speed up parser with code contributed by Alain Roy.
  • -allow lock-override was mistakenly commented. Fixed in a patch to 3.20. Thanks to Manuel Gallas for noticing!
  • Fix a problem with pacballs where an installation specifying the full path of a pacball fails. Installation by "bash [pacball]" or via a relative path is not affected.
  • Add JAB cache.
  • Fix source file protection problem with makePacball.py.
  • Fix quoted version problem in making Pacballs noticed by Xin Zhao of BNL.
  • Added -allow no-http-cache as suggested by Shunwei Ye of BNL.
  • Fixed platform problem with AIX noticed by Alain Roy.
  • Fixed 3.19->3.20 database transition complaint noticed by Isabell Trigger.
  • Replaced use of zcat as suggested by Kevin Flasch (UW) and Ray Plante (NCSA). zcat was causing problems on Solaris.
  • Fixed bug in pre and post setup scripts. Thanks to Andrew Sharpe for pointing this out.
  • Added Gentoo to supported platforms. Fixed problems with Ubuntu and Yellow Dog OS recognition.
  • Added -pacball for generating self installing "pacball" scripts that install software without needing Pacman or internet access.
  • -lock-override no longer is saved as an allow option and must be supplied for each operation that voluntarily overrides a cache that has been locked by it's owner.
  • Improved error messages generated via wget.
  • Made improvements in rpm handling.
• Pacman-3.19.1, January, 19 2007
  • Fixed a bug noticed thanks to both Emil Obreshkov (CERN) and Patrick McGuigan (UTA). This bug affected updating for packages in an unused OR branch. The symptom is errors of the form "Can't find [some-package-name]." causing the update to fail. If you haven't seen this problem, it is only necessary to update your Pacman. If the problem has happened for you, you may have to re-install. This should not affect OSG or VDT installs.
  • Fixed benign typo in error message.
• Pacman-3.19, October 29, 2006.
  • Fixed a problem notice by Sigve Haug caused if your userid is not in the passwd file.
  • Add am-UM, am-RAL default symbolic cache names.
  • Rename am-CERN symbolic name and remove am-CERN-afs.
  • Improve miscellaneous error messages including "download failure" message.
  • Fixed a ^C vunerability that Edward Diehl (UM) reported.
  • Automatically use urllib2 if wget is not in the installer's path.
  • Remove the -allow save-setups option as this behavior is now the default, i.e. setup scripts are not removed while an installation is being modified.
  • Add pre- and post- setup code in all Pacman generated setup scripts.
  • No longer put the /src directory in PYTHONPATH of the user to avoid interference with other applications.
  • Improve platform detection and handling. RHEL-4 no longer satisfies RHEL-3 etc. Only coarsest OS version number is considered (e.g. RHEL-4 and RHEL-4.1 are considered identical). More platforms are recognized including Unbuntu, Yellow Dog and RHEL variants making -pretend-platform necessary less often.
• Pacman-3.18.5, June 26, 2006
  • Snuck in am-IU at the last minute. Thanks to Kristy Kallbac-Rose for setting it up.
  • Added the ITB, am-CERN, am-CERN-afs and modified the ATLAS symbolic name.
  • Removed the gcc version in -version as this was confusing people into thinking that it's the gcc version on their system (it's actually the gcc version used to build python).
  • Catch and ignore assertion errors in the python urllib2 library causing hung machines to cause Pacman to end with an abort exception.
  • Use urllib2 as a backup if wget is not available.
• Pacman-3.18.4, May 16, 2006
  • Minor fix to decrease memory use, particularly in Atlas installs. 3.18.3 briefly needed 1100M to install a standard Atlas release (this situation existed since 3.18.2). 3.18.4 peaks at about 150M during an Atlas full release install. Thanks to Paolo Calafiura for pointing out the problem.
• Pacman-3.18.3, May 8, 2006
  • Bug fix found my Emil. This was a bug in the error message that occurs if untarring a tarball would place a file in a path where there is an existing directory of the same name.
• Pacman-3.18.2, May 7, 2006
  • Added feedback, logging and extra checking for wget downloads.
  • Added -bell to beep when a Pacman command is finished.
• Pacman-3.18.1, May 2, 2006.
  • Fixed a problem where you can't do -lc etc. on an installation that you don't have write access to the directory (pointed out by Simon George).
  • Fixed the am-UCHEP symbolic name. Added am-IU symbolic name.
  • -retry option now gets used by both wget and urllib2 access methods.
  • Fixed one more update problem noticed by S.Y.
• Pacman-3.18, April 28, 2006.
  • Fixed a problem causing mirrors created on 64 bit machines to be unreadable.
  • Use wget rather than urllib2 as the default for downloading. -allow urllib2 forces urllib2.
  • Improved error messages related to putting Pacman source files in the current working directory. Pacman now ignores a Pacman installation if you mistakenly make it in a source cache.
  • Trust of a .caches file or mirror now implies trust of the dependent caches without asking individually.
  • Add -allow extract-overwrite to allow files to be overwritten when using -extract-downloads.
  • Added -tar-overwrites option. Use this after an installation to find out the current overwrite situation.
  • Changed tar-overwriting defaults for ATLAS.
  • Fixed a bug causing Pacman not to correctly handle situations where tarballs untar into each others subdirectories. Thanks to Grigori and Emil for noticing this.
  • Renamed the Cookie module to avoid clashes with the standard Python library (thanks to Conrad Steenberg for noticing).
  • Added CentOS as a supported Platform as requested by Terrence Martin.
  • Fixed a bug causing a traceback rather than a nice message on one of the grandcentral machines.
  • Evaded an apparent Python bug in shutil causing failures for some platforms.
  • Fixed a bug affecting -update-check of package statements inside an OR branch causing Pacman to think that there is an update available even when there isn't.
• Pacman-3.17 March 14, 2006.
  • Fixed a problem the Jerrod noticed causing "contact Pacman headquarters."
  • Added IFIC Scientific Linux. Thanks for the assist from Belen Salvachua Ferrando.
  • Using -allow trust-all-caches now also suppresses the question asking to replace a symbolic cache name when using the register atom.
  • Fixed a slightly no-standard command line switch in runningProcess that caused this to fail on some OSs.
  • Fixed a minor problem with CP.
  • Fixed a bug in mirrors causing .cache files with explicit http addresses in them not to mirror properly.
  • Fixed a problem in .caches files where in-line comments didn't work.
  • Turned of retrying downloadUntarzip as this doesn't work often enough to justify the confusion it causes when it doesn't work.
  • Improved the time stamps in the o..pacman..o/logs/pacman.log file - suggestion by Alain Roy and Tim Cartwright.
  • Improved the default verbose messages on -update and -update-check suggested by Alain.
  • Added some improved error messages when running out of disk space during untarring.
  • Fixed a bug introduced in 3.16 which caused installing from existing installations to fail. Thanks to Alessandro de Salvo for noticing.
  • Fixed a bug caused a "Contact Pacman Headquarters" message if you use 3.16.1 on an old (<3.13) installation. Thanks to Rolf Seuster for reporting the problem.
  • Added IEPM-BW default symbolic cache name (Jerrod Williams managing).
  • Bug fix in the platform atom causing platform to behave like platformGE. Noticed by Nate Mueller.
  • Major new features, particularly added mirrors and new-style snapshots.
  • Fixed -allow bad-paths, which was being ignored.
  • Allow files containing "{" in tarballs.
  • Fixed detection of Fermi SL 3.0.3 and the fact that -platforms doesn't work if your plaform isn't recognized. Thanks to Jason Harrington for pointing this out.
• Pacman-3.15. November 29, 2005.
  • Fixed the behavior of "lock" files as suggested by Emil Obreshkov. You can now put a file called "lock" in any subdirectory of a cache to lock individual subdirectories.
  • Added -resume as suggested by Dieter Best.
  • Added BNL symbolic cache name.
  • Possibly fixed the pythonVersion() problem that Nate reported.
  • Fixed a bug notice by Alan Sill causing "Error in Pacman" message if you use Pacman 3.14.1 on an old existing installation.
  • Added a small change is SuSE platform detection so that "SUSE" is recognized as well as "SuSE" - requested by Alain.
  • Let -help work even on an unsupported platform. Thanks to Dan Yocum for noticing the problem.
  • Removed --no-same-owner tar option for TeraGrid.
  • Fix -v shell-out which wasn't showing the shell output from shell atoms.
  • Check for non-standard special characters in tarball file names was not being turned off by -allow bad-tar-filenames and it was checking for some special characters which are actually OK. Thanks to Horst Severini for noticing.
  • Remove shelve as the default database.
  • Re-fixed the protection atoms.
• Pacman-3.14. October 5, 2005.
  • Check for non-standard special characters in filenames in tarballs. Thanks to Diana Scannicchio for reporting this problem.
  • Added -ask tar, -ask unzip sticky switch options.
  • Settable http retries now also sets the number of download/unzip retries as a way of dealing with NFS problems experienced at some ATLAS sites.
  • Add support for OSF1 (for TeraGrid), SL-4 family and "BU-Linux."
  • Removed the possiblity that ^C at the wrong time could cause a corrupted database.
  • Removed dependence on PWD environment variable in setup.csh (but not sh).
  • Pacman now uses GNU tar if any of tar/gtar/gnutar are actually GNU tar (see, also -allow). This is for TeraGrid. Thanks to JP Navarro for the suggestion.
  • Fixed a bug giving a "call Pacman headquarters" error if you used freeDisk on a non-linux os. Thanks to Jason Brechin for noticing.
  • Changed the value of VDT for Nate and Alain.
  • Fixed a problem noticed by Nate causing confusing warning messages if an OR branch that Pacman can figure out will not be executed contains a package.
  • Fixed a problem where -remove-all refused to remove a package if the package had dependent packages which had not been found (this did not affect -remove).
  • -snap -out path or -o path used to ignore the full path of the specified output and always create the snapshot locally. It's fixed now.
  • Setup.csh(sh) were broken in the Sept.13 pre-release. There're fixed now. Thanks to JP Navarro for noticing (they got broken by a mail program adding invisible characters that bothered only some shells!).
  • Added glibcVersion, glibcVersionLE as well as gcc version as suggested by Nate Mueller.
  • freeMegsMinimum incorrectly didn't take a default second argument.
  • Fixed a problem where ^D in answer to questions caused a traceback instead of a nice error.
  • Add option -allow save-setup to save setup scripts before replacing or removing them. Thanks to Lisa Giacchetti for this suggestion.
  • Fixed problem in setup scripts that gave an awk error on Solaris. Thanks to Scott Koranda for pointing this out.
  • Added TeraGrid symbolic cache name to the default registry.
  • Add usePort atom as suggested by Nate Mueller.
  • Add an optional argument to the AbsPath atom.
  • Improve error messages when packages are not found or caches aren't specified.
  • Providing no options for a -v-like command line switch now results in an error message rather than no action.
  • Added setenvShellTemp atom as suggested by Nate.
  • Fixed broken link to grid.html page in the documentation.
• Pacman-3.13.1. August 5, 2005.
  • Fixed ChownR which was not changing ownership.
  • Removed the assumption that "." is in the users path in the setup scripts. Thanks to John Weigand for noticing.
  • Added the absPath() atom. This requires that a Pacman installation begin in an absolute non-symlinked location.
  • Fixed shellDialogue so that it gives continuous output to sysout. Thanks to Nate Mueller for noticing.
  • Removed erroneous include of bsddb module (not available on all Python installations). Thanks to Rolf Seuster for noticing.
  • -domain uses -dom all by default.
  • Redefined the ATLAS symbolic cache name to point to their default SLC3 cache.
  • Add darwin-10.X platforms thanks to Nate Mueller (see % pacman -platforms).
  • Replace timeErrorMaximum so that it doesn't depend on ntdupdate any more (John Brunelle).
  • Replaced main database attempting to avoid NFS problems reported by Simon, Grigori and Jorgen. 3.13 reads either the old or new database. Conversion from 3.12 databases is unnecessary.
  • Improved initial setup.csh(sh) scripts (John Brunelle). Now a) only the initial source setup.csh(sh) has to be in the untarred top level directory, after this you can source the setup scripts from any location, b) the initial setup installs Python if necessary without asking any questions c) the initialization procedure works correctly even if there is no Python available at all.
  • Added optional third argument to path to turn off path clash detecting. Thanks to Christian for pointing out the need for this.
  • Added optional third argument to textFile. Thanks to Jason Brechin for the suggestion.
  • Fixed a problem where tarballs created by tar -cvf ./*... weren't handled correctly.
  • Improvements to alreadyInstalled, runningProcess, askUntilFileExists.
  • Deconfused a Pacman version error message pointed out by Emil Obreshkov.
  • Improved -help output and -def speed.
  • Improve -verify and -v tarfiles feedback.
  • Sped up installation cache database access. Thanks to Rob Gardner for noticing this problem.
  • Improved handling of Rocks-3.
  • Fixed a problem where Pacman could not remove the Pacman installation which was currently being executed.
  • Fixed a bug in configure(...) causing "looping packages" on uninstallation. Thanks to Valerie Fine of STAR for noticing this.
  • Various small documentation improvements.
  • Fixed setOwnerExecute, setGroupExecute, etc.
• Pacman-3.12. June 8, 2005.
  • An index for all Pacman language elements added to the documentation (by John Brunelle).
  • New platforms: FreeBSD, IRIX, Sun, Rocks, SL, SLC, Fermi-SL (see -platforms for a complete list).
  • Improved -platforms output; added -platform switch (see -help).
  • Added -pretend-platform.
  • -setups now controls what kind of setup scripts you get.
  • Fixed a number of typos in the documentation found by John Brunelle.
  • Fixed a bug in configure(...) and duplicates in setup.csh scripts noticed by Nate Mueller.
  • Added setenvShell - a suggestion of JP Navarro of ANL.
  • Improved -d cmp display of system property atoms.
  • Fixed a couple of typos in the documentation.
  • Fixed a bug in workspace which didn't write to it's perl setup script.
  • Fixed a bug where inserting comments in Pacman source code caused Pacman to believe that the package had changed and had an available update.
  • Add -single option for -update.
  • Added default symbolic cache names for LDR, GridCat, OSG.
  • Fixed missing relation SLC-3<=SLC-4 in platform representation - noticed by Shawn McKee.
  • Allow relative path names in cache lists.
  • Extend rpmInstalled to work for both rpm package names and full rpm file names. Thanks to Shawn McKee for the suggestion.
  • Fixed a bug in softLink found by Scott Koranda.
  • Fixed linuxKernel which was not working correctly on non-RH systems. Noticed by Scott.
  • Fixed a problem where if a package has an unresolved dependency, it can't uninstall.
  • Fixed a problem with downloading noticed by JP Navarro of ANL.
  • Added proxies, authenticated proxies and -v proxy. Thanks to Gerson Galang and Sam Moscwa.
  • Fixed missing -v retry option noticed by Alain Roy.
  • Added platform detection for Rocks (thanks to Nate Mueller).
  • Fixed bug introduced in 3.11 where downloadUntar('xxx.tar') downloaded but did not untar tarballs. Noticed by Jean-Paul Navarro.
  • In downloadUntar(path) path is interpreted as a relative path of a tarball at the remote cache rather than a local path on the installer's machine.
  • Add -allow trust-all-caches.
  • Protected installation database against end of disk errors and others which happened while the database is being written.
  • Added Mirror caches (turned off for 3.12 as I want to re-do the format somewhat).
  • Improved handling of html download failures.
  • Fixed missing compilation check of argument to the version atom, noticed by Christian Arnault.
  • Fixed -clear-registry. Problem noticed by Christian Arnault.
  • Improved registry display.
  • Depth first updating.
  • Fixed two bugs re: relative addressing of list caches ("index.caches" files) the one of the pre-releases of 3.12 noticed by Christian.
  • Changed the code so that the system tmp area is never used, i.e. so that only o..pacman..o/tmp is used for temporary files. Thanks to Iwona of LBNL for pointing this out.
  • Fixed a problem caused if you try to use 3.11 to update an installation created with 3.10. The symptom is a message telling you to "contact Pacman headquarters." Thanks to Emil Obreshkov for noticing the problem.
• Pacman-3.11. March 29, 2005.
  • Added support for MacOS, SuSE-9, SuSE-9.1, SuSE-9.2, SuSE-9.3.
  • Added more -retry options.
  • Added -o or -out to specify an output file for snapshots as suggested by Christian Arnault.
  • Rewrote untarring to handle tar-overwriting precisely and to increase speed.
  • -allow tar-overwrite no longer needed for ATLAS.
  • Add official support for Darwin aka MacOS.
  • Fixed a bug in requirements selection "| ...". The effect of the bug was to ignore the requirements condition in certain circumstances.
  • download('xxx') where 'xxx' is a filename is now assumed to be prefixed with the cache name of the cache containing the source code. This means that if you put tarballs like xxx.tar.gz in the same directory of a source cache, you can download them with download('xxx.tar.gz'). This is convenient for making caches which are easily moveable to different file systems.
  • Specification of packages directly by source code file name works now independent of the package name.
  • downloadUntarzip(...) now doesn't attempt to untar/zip unless the downloaded file has the usual suffixes.
  • Improve overwriting tarball removals.
  • Fixed a minor type-mismatch which caused writing an error message to fail.
• Pacman-3.10. February 15, 2005.
  • The shelve module has been replaced by a different implementation. This caused nasty OS/Python version dependent problems.
  • -clear-snapshots now works rather than does nothing, as notice by Alessandro de Salvo.
  • Fixed problem where empty directory trees may be left behind after removing ATLAS installations.
  • Add -history as well as -last to show the history of Pacman commands and results.
  • Setup scripts appropriately regenerated on -update operations.
  • Fixed using an installation cache if you don't have write permission.
  • Added -retry to control http retries and pauses.
  • No longer have to have write priviledges on an installation to use it as a cache. Error messages improved.
  • Add an md5check atom.
• Pacman-3.03. January 31, 2005.
  • Added CERN Scientific Linux and Tao Linux as a supported platforms.
  • Added lock mechanism for source caches.
  • Fixed -remove problem where the default -recursive remove removes dependencies even if they might be dependents of non-removed packages.
  • Added launchWebBrowser() and askUntilFileExists() atoms.
  • Added -d description, -d url and -d tar (the last displays tarball contents when used with -d cmp).
  • Added -v path and -ask path to control verbosity and permission for path variable assignments.
  • Added -v pac and -ask pac to control verbosity and ask permission to install and uninstall packages.
  • Improved error messages if uinstall shell commands fail.
  • Package environments are now setup before uninstall as this is sometimes needed by uninstall shell commands.
  • Improved handling of failing downloads.
  • Fixed typos in a tutorial noticed by Marco.
  • Added documentation for workspace.
  • Added atoms patch and option atoms. These behave identically to "version", "release" and "tag" but let Pacman authors to chose a version string atom that goes along with their own normal terminology.
  • Fixed a bug in Path handling causing paths to be mangled during uninstallation.
  • Fixed a bug translating old source code which sometimes causes paths to be incorrectly prefixed to environment variable values.
  • Fixed a problem where -fetch incorrectly reported that a package was not installable (this did not affect anything in the sense that if you tried installing anyway, it would work).
  • -extract-download now asks before overwriting an existing download file.
• Pacman-3.02. January 1, 2005.
  • Added returns exit code 0 if the Pacman command succeeds, 1 otherwise.
  • Added supported architectures RedHat, Fedora, Cygwin, RHEL, AIX, SuSE and Debian.
  • Added "Writing your own Pacman package" tutorial to the standard documentation.
  • Set TMP environment variable to full path of local temp area. Problem pointed out by Nate Mueller.
  • The default -remove will now not remove packages which are depended upon by other packages in the installation. This makes -remove the inverse of -get.
  • Added "SOURCE" translation (undocumented PM2 feature) for Nate.
  • Added some old Pacman 2 style platform names that VDT's current source code is referring to.
  • Fixed a nice problem that Jerry Gieraltowski ran into having to do with the meaning of download=... in the old syntax. The list of guards and downloads may be tested in any order, but it's clear that the authors of some Pacman code intend for it to be tests in a particular order. The order actually tested turns out to be python version dependent (at least) and can cause problems if the guards aren't mutually exclusive. I settled this by fixing the order of testing to always be the given order.
  • Added code suggested by Nate Mueller to make setup.pl perl output as well as sh,csh and py.
  • Added many platforms known and supported (see -platforms). Unknown platforms are now equivalent to '*'.
  • Snapshot default file names are now nicer.
  • Added restore which lets you save configuration information between uninstalls of a package. See the packages section of the documentation.
  • Return username "unknown" rather than aborting if the UID is unknown.
  • Removed $PWD in the initial setup.sh for bourne shell.
  • Slight improvement in snapshot filenames.
  • Fixed a problem with uninstall shell commands.
  • Improved fetching so that dependent packages are fetched even if they are not satisfiable (this is convenient for the purposes of snapshotting, extract-downloads and extract-sources).
• Pacman-3.01. November 28, 2004. FIRST NON-BETA RELEASE.
  • Documentation complete.
  • Installs VDT, Atlas releases,Grid3, Grid3Dev
  • Available as % pacman -get Pacman:Pacman

• Pacman-3.0024. November 25, 2004.
  • Added advanced updating tutorial II.
  • Added automatic package removal when installation directories are removed.
  • Added versionTuple for tuple of integer style version numbers.
• Pacman-3.0023. November 23, 2004.
  • Improved how syntax errors are reported.
  • Fixed problem with Paths causing old syntax to perform the new extra tests, causing VDT to fail to install - pointed out by Jerry Gieraltowski.
  • Added gccBinary, gccBinaryLE, ... which let's you require that particular binaries are compiled with particular versions of gcc.
  • Added system properties atoms systemWordSize, byteOrder, processor, systemVersion and systemRelease atoms.
• Pacman-3.0022. November 22, 2004.
  • Fix a problem with snapshots where if you used a symbolic cache name to get the snapshot it kept having to reload it.
  • Fixed a problem in free disk space checking.
  • Fixed a bug that caused package installations to fail if they don't start in the home directory.
  • Added the "Handling multiple versions of the same software" tutorial.
• Pacman-3.0021. November 22, 2004.
  • Remove checking download existence at fetch time.
  • Add linux2 platform.
  • Add update to AIX detection from Alain and Nate.
  • Platform handling and % pacman -platforms output improved.
  • Defined an initially supported set of architectures.
  • Improved Path clash handling (suggestion by Christian).
  • Renamed -dom to -domain.
  • Improved error messages for tar-overwrites.
  • -ask tar-over
  • Some improvements to snapshots.
  • Improvements to questions asking and saving with Choice, yes, etc.
  • Added advanced updating tutorial.
  • Speed up snapshot loading.
• Pacman-3.0019. November 18, 2004.
  • Changed the default Python version installed from 2.3.4 to 2.2.3 (done only if Python 2.2 is not already there).
• Pacman-3.0018. November 18, 2004.
  • Added gsiftp addressing for caches, e.g. gsiftp://atlas.bu.edu/caches/:Python. This works for all types of caches except installation caches, which must be in the local file system.
  • Made redhat, fedora and cygwin as the default starting platform families. To override this do % pacman -allow unsupported-platform once.
  • Improved the documentation and small fixes.
• Pacman-3.0017. November 16, 2004.
  • I had turned off the output for shellDialogue by accident. I turned it back on.
  • Added setenv('FOO') now asks the installer for the value of an environment variable as input and assumes the answer as a cookie for future questions.
  • Fixed typo in -help noticed by Alain Roy.
  • Removed -preference from the documentation since it's no longer used.
  • Added the setup atom to the documentation.
  • -extract-sources and -extract-downloads now default to "." on an empty cache list.
  • Fixed a bug noticed by Nate Mueller. I had forgotten to translate the "exists" option of the old syntax's "nativelyInstalled." This produced an error in generating an error message about the problem resulting in a traceback.
• Pacman-3.0016. November 15, 2004.
  • Added -dom ... which makes a complete display of the environment of the list of caches. Normally, you just do % pacman -dom in an installation area to see a complete list of downloads, shell commands etc., sorted into types.
  • Added the watch atom. This lets you add files or subdirectories to the Pacman environment to be monitored for changes over time. This is a very nice suggestion from Yannick Patois.
  • I believe that I fixed a problem that Jerry Gieraltowsi was having with Pacman 2.9x and VDT.
  • VDT appears to install correctly.
  • Atlas Releases appear to install correctly.
  • Miscellaneous small improvements.
  • Minor problems with using installations as caches are fixed.
• Pacman-3.0015. November 14, 2004. Miscellaneous improvements.
• Pacman-3.0014. November 12, 2004
  • The web documentation is almost complete (% pacman -info).
  • The known problem from 3.0012 is fixed.
  • Many small improvements in display and error messages.
  • Much testing of the cache hierarchy, updating and snapshots.
• Pacman-3.0013. November 10, 2004
  • The cache hierarchy (which no one has probably yet used) has reached it's final form. This will be really nice!
  • -allow bad-paths is on by default till I have a chance to improve the checking on this.
  • Added % pacman -extract-sources {cache list} extracts all the source codes from a list of caches. Typically this is handy for getting back all the source code in any installation.
  • Added % pacman -extract-downloads {cache list} downloads all the files downloaded in a list of caches.
  • I changed the default for remove and uninstall back to recursive. Use -single to uninstall or remove single packages (note that with -single, may have to also uninstall packages depending on package configuration).
• Pacman-3.0012. November 9, 2004
  • Snapshots are available. See the documentation for examples.
  • The documentation has been updated somewhat. It's still not finished.
  • The updating behavior of the cache hierarchy has been improved.
  • -preference is now gone. -v, -d, -ask options are now saved as defaults whenever they are used. You can still do -clear-preferences to remove all such default options.
  Known problem: -get and -install are blocked when you install packages from an installation cache. You can use -fetch instead until I get a chance to fix this.
• Pacman-3.0011. November 6, 2004
  • Changed "=pacman=" to "o..pacman..o" to avoid potential special character problems in external utility programs.
  • Fixed a problem with the -v option where the defaults did not disappear if you overrode them with -v {something}.
  • Changed the default behavior for uninstall and remove. The default behavior for -fetch, -install, -get is recursive. The default behavior for -uninstall and -remove is now NOT recursive. % pacman -remove A, for instance, removes A and the minimal addiitonal packages required by configuration dependencies. To remove or uninstall recursively, use % pacman -r -remove A, etc.
  • Minor improvements in the -l, -lc browsing output.
  • Fixed a problem with uninstalling when multiple packages depend on the same package.
  Suggestions made by Yannick Patois and Christian Arnault.
• Pacman-3.0010. November 2, 2004. Major release. See the documentation with -info.

• Pacman-2.9275. Flatten src tree for zippiness.
• Pacman-2.9274. Made the initial python installation (if necessary) more robust. Added linux2 for Jim's fedora system. Changed VDT to point to their new location.
• Pacman-2.9273. Changed "fermi-linux"->"linux-fermi".
• Pacman-2.9272. Added fermi-linux and -pretendPlatform.
• Pacman-2.9271. Adding -v:text for Xin.
• Pacman-2.9270. Evaluate enviros in the setup('...') command at installation time rather than passing them to the setup scripts literally.
• Pacman-2.9268. Hack to get around condor installation command that's returning an error code.
• Pacman-2.9267. Fixed problem reading grid-mapfile noticed by Xin Zhao.
• Pacman-2.9266. Improvements to envIsSet.
• Pacman-2.9265. Tweaks to insertLine for ATLAS DC2 purposes.
• Pacman-2.9264. Always use the local installation E/tmp directory for downloads.
• Pacman-2.9262. For compatibility purposes, I've removed the requirement that non-temporary environment variables keep the value that they are first set to. I'll introduce a new function that does this for authors who want to guarantee that an environment variable remains unchanged.
• Pacman-2.9261. Prepend ./ to the python building script.
• Pacman-2.9260. Python now installs it's own Python 2.3.3 if it's needed. You can start with any version of Python >= 1.5.2. The argument order of softLink is swapped at Marco's request.
• Pacman-2.9258. Fixed an actual bug related to the new untarzip and Pacman2 compatibility. The symptom was that cd-ing into $PAC_TARBALLROOT was missing (remember PAC_TARBALLROOT is gone now, except for Pacman2 compatibility). Bug noticed by Yannik.
• Pacman-2.9257. Fixed compatibility issue.
• Pacman-2.9256. Fixed bug preventing updates with the Copy function (found by Marco M.).
• Pacman-2.9255. Registry entries now are added at compile time, so use of "alreadyInstalled" is typically not necessary. Added "fail" function. Improved various error messages.
• Pacman-2.9250. More spiffing. The untar atom now has an optional argument to assign an environment variable to the untarred subdirectory (if the second argument is not '' and the tarball does not untar into a single subdirectory, an error results). untar('xxx.tar.gz','XXX_HOME') is a typical use. XXX_HOME is a temporary environment variable only [you can make it permanent by doing setenv('XXX_HOME','$XXX_HOME')]. Downloading is also improved. There is a new atom downloadUntarzip which downloads and untar/zips a tarball as one operation. The first argument is the same as the existing download. An optional second argument has the same meaning as in the new untar. For example, downloadUntarzip('http://.../xxx.tar.gz','XXX_HOME') downloads and unzips xxx.tar.gz. Besides brevity, the advantage of this is that the tarball does not remain after the operation is finished. In contrast, if you do this in two steps with download and untarzip, the tarball will remain. Both the new untar and downloadUntarzip allow tarballs that don't untar into a single top level subdirectory (thanks to Jerry Gieraltowski for pointing out this problem).
• Pacman-2.9242. Fixed benign bug in the compiler. Minor spiffing.
• Pacman-2.9238. Fixed wrong URL for BNL-PAS as pointed out by Alden. Added -v:browser to show browser launching attempt information. Fixed running processes testing as pointed out by Patrick. Tracked down and squished a bug that affected ATLAS 7.5.0. The bug was benign in the sense that it would not find a .pacman file rather than making an incorrect installation. Many minor spiffings.
• Pacman-2.9227. Paths are now checked for consistency and clashes between packages. Untarring is sped up. Minor spiffing in various places. VDT 1.1.13 installs correctly. iVDGL:Grid3dev installs correctly.
• Pacman-2.9219. Documentation update only.
• Pacman-2.9218. Fixed bug in Paths noticed by Patrick McGuigan. The symptom was that paths defined got expressed in the setup scripts independent of whether they were satisifed in the language expression.
• Pacman-2.9217. Improved ^C handling. Added Pippy output after talking with Pat McGuigan of UTA. The problem with snapshots noticed by Alessandro de Salvo has been fixed.
• Pacman-2.9210. Added circular dependency checking. This caused a problem with ATLAS:7.7.0 where a circular dependency snuck in. Fixed BNL-PAS default symbolic name for Wensheng Deng. Fixed a problem with snapshots noticed by Alessandro De Salvo. Added tutorials I-IV to the documentation pages.
• Pacman-2.9079. Fixed a problem noticed by Jakub Moscicki. Tarballs containing dangling symbolic links caused Pacman to claim that the tarball wasn't untarred correctly. Test for correct Python version activated again.

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