Payload Delivery Vehicle

Thanks to Source Forge and VA Linux for hosting this project. If you have an Open Source project that needs a home on the Internet you really should check these guys out.

Payload Delivery Vehicle (PDV) is a program that builds an executable that contains a complete package (e.g. and RPM, System V package or tar file) and the commands required to install it. When the executable is run it will extract the payload (the package) and then execute another command (such as rpm -i, pkgadd -d etc.). The big advantage to this is that a developer can hand a user a single file to be executed - the end user does not need to know how to extract the package or how to install it.

A more complete description is available in the README. Instructions for building and installing PDV are available from INSTALL.

There is a project page on sourceforge for PDV on which you can submit bug reports, check for news and do just about anything else related to this project. It also has a more complete list of file releases.

Please feel free to email suggestions, complaints or requests - it may be better to use the mailing list, but I can also be reached directly at gwiley@ieee.org.

Current Release

The current release of PDV is version 1.5.1 (a bug fix for 1.5).

The releases (source and binary) should be downloaded from the files section of the project page on sourceforge

I will be happy to supply binaries for any of the platforms that I have available. Some of them are listed in the "Supported Platforms" section.

Changes from 1.4 to 1.5

Version 1.5.1 implements a fix for a bug that causes cores when using help files over 1K.

The following changes were implemented in version 1.5:

New option to allow an "agreement" that can be presented when a user attempts to extract the package, if he does not answer "yes" then the package will not extract. This was put in at a user's request and is intended for copyrights, disclaimers etc.
Some updates to the documentation, including more detials in the man pages.
Added some system error checking (nothing special, we print a message and then die - still better than coreing).
Fixed the install scripts to properly handle non-BSD install binaries (such as Solaris).
Make will no longer attempt to build X11 if told not to.

Changes from 1.3 to 1.4

The following changes were implemented in version 1.4:

New X11/Motif utility to simplify the contruction of PDV packages.
Introduced spec files to capture the options used to build a PDV package - these can be read/written from both the command line and the X11 utilities.
Preserve file permissions when extracting the payload to match those on the file when it was originally packaged.
Added some system error checking (nothing special, we print a message and then die - still better than coreing).
Fixed a broken implementation of strdup() (for systems that don't have it).

Known Defects

The defects from release 1.4 have been cleaned up, as far as I can tell there are no serious problems with 1.5 - drop me a line if you find anything.

Supported Platforms

Autoconf was used so PDV is likely to build and run on a variety of platforms. If you find one that gives you trouble let me know and I will try to remedy the situation. I have sucessfully built/executed pdv in the following environments:

Solaris 8 (sparc): gcc 2.95, gnu make
Solaris 2.6 (sparc): gcc 2.95, gnu make
Linux (Red Hat 6.1): egcs-2.91.66

Mailing Lists

There is a mailing list for PDV hosted by Source Forge, to subscribe send email to pdv-users-request@lists.sourceforge.net with "subscribe" in the subject or body of the message.

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