windowz -cygwin

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Serguei Bakhteiarov

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Jul 27, 2010, 10:03:50 AM7/27/10
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Hello,

Any words regarding Windows slack deployments (cygwin is OK)?

sincerely,
-serge

Kurt Miebach

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Jul 28, 2010, 8:34:17 AM7/28/10
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On 27 Jul., 16:03, Serguei Bakhteiarov <bakhteia...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any words regarding Windows slack deployments (cygwin is OK)?

I am not an authority in this field, I can only report from my
experience when I tried installing slack using cygwin some months ago.

I gave up soon because I found the perl scripts are not written for
windows systems and do not work there without modifications that I
cannot do. A perl person may see this from a different angle. If
anyone knows how to use slack on windows I would also be interested.

When I ran into the perl problems I saw it would probably be easier to
develop something new from the start that mimics the way slack works,
for instance using cygwin / python, which I am more familiar with than
perl. (I never started this)

Cheers
Kurt Miebach

Alan Sundell

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Jul 28, 2010, 12:26:30 PM7/28/10
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The other issue is that slack is mostly intended for clobbering configuration files (crudely filling in a gap left by package managers).   Such config files aren't as common on Windows as on UNIX, and would probably be locked with Windows' mandatory locking if they were ("this file is in use by another program....").

And yeah, slack is just a wrapper around rsync that does a little option processing and invokes subprocesses in a certain way (so we can pass filenames on STDIN, etc).  That's the code that would need to change, but there isn't much other code there...

So writing it to work on Windows would basically mean re-writing it, AFAICT (and adding things like registry handling).

--Alan


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Lorenzo Gomez

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Dec 11, 2012, 7:50:33 AM12/11/12
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I know this post is over a year old, however, I had the same question. Mostly because I was a windows sysadmin for 5 years before moving over to being unix/linux sysadmin. I spent alot of time scripting in windows, mostly batch and vbscripts. When I moved to the Unix side of the house were I work, they were using slack. So I started thinking that it would have been great to have something similar on windows since we could never get SCCM to work correctly. So essentially what I did was to start writing a "package manager" in powershell, that would create "local catalogs and a global catalog" along with a serious of powershell scripts that would get called that would check the current version of different pieces of software on the systems, then automagically download the new version from the web, update the "global catalog" and use various aspects of powershell to deploy the updates. Mostly by running a diff of the global and local catalog files after using PSdrive to mount the remote path of where I had the local catalog created on the local system. Plus it's easier to google powershell equivalent to awk or sed, then it is to figure out how to clean up output generated from the standard out from the normal windows command prompt.

Alan Sundell

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Dec 21, 2012, 3:04:39 PM12/21/12
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[Sorry, I let the message above languish in the moderation queue for a while.]

Lorenzo, this sounds neat -- I don't work with Windows very much these days, so I'm not much help, but I've had people ask me about such a thing several times before, so there's definitely interest if you can make it work (and as far as I can tell, PS is pretty sweet).

So, if you've got something that's useful to you, you should publish the code, and then maybe we can get people to take a look and give it a spin. :)

Best of luck,
--Alan


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