J_K9 @ Linux

Breathing Life Back Into HyperGet

Some of you may have heard of a project I started over a year ago called HyperGet. What you may not know is that it died in the cold of January 2005 - all but two developers lost contact with the rest of the team (and have not replied since), and the project lost its direction completely as the Lead Developer was one of those who left. However, against all odds, it’s under development again and we’re hoping to release v0.1 (with fairly minimal features) in a few weeks’ time. The description on the project’s homepage is a little out of date, as its functionality has changed and the way in which Xiro (the application which downloads the files) interacts with the PC without internet access. How has it changed? Well, just before the project died, I contacted the excellent developers of Synaptic and the Lead Developer agreed to consider implementing Fido (the package management and dependency resolving part) once v0.1 of Xiro was out. Whether the Synaptic team still want to implement Fido I don’t know, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed! It has been a year since we were last in touch, after all.

Although the LSB Packaging group is working hard to produce a universal package format to make it easier for third-party developers to distribute packages, I suspect it shall be at least another few months (if not longer) until such a package format and its related management system appear and are implemented by most Linux distributions. So, HyperGet will be safe until then - and, after that, we may even be able to alter HyperGet to work with that package format instead of the current .deb, although that will depend on the specification of the package format and management system (ie. how dependencies are handled) that the LSB create.

And, before I finish, I must give my thanks to llama love (now HyperGet’s Lead Developer) for inspiring me and for working so diligently on our project. Keep up the great work