pCompress bugs

[MochiMoppel]

I found pCompress as an option in the right-click menu of @radky 's BookwormPup64 10.0.7.
Never used it and thought to give it a try. It failed.

1) right-clicked the folder /boot
2) a dialog appears. I accepted all defaults and pressed "Create"
3) an error message appears
4) an empty archive /boot.tar.gz is created

Looking at the code it is obvious why the tool failed. inputdir=${inputfile%/*} in line 28 strips the inputfile /boot to an empty string instead of stripping to the parent directory '/'.
Even if this line would be fixed, the next command in line 29 [[ $inputdir == */ ]] && inputdir=${inputdir%\/} would "unfix" the error. This command is redundant anyway and shouldn't exist in the first place.

I would prefer to leave corrections to the author, but who is the author? And where is the forum thread? There is only a tersed "#2014" header comment in the file. IMHO this is not acceptable. I don't care for the license notice but I'm reluctant to use a tool of unknown origin.

[radky]

@MochiMoppel l

It seems pCompress was added to Puppy by the following Woof-CE commit (16 Oct 2019):

https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/w ... afa8e159b2

[ozsouth]

@MochiMoppel - user @plinej began working on this last year. v0.5 was released in Feb2024, but I notice that lines 62-63 are same as those you queried - see: https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... ss#p111780
I use the older version just to make hybrid iso's, which works.

[MochiMoppel]

It seems pCompress was added to Puppy by the following Woof-CE commit (16 Oct 2019):

You mean it is a contribution of the same guy who left Woof-CE in December 2019 with the comment "Puppy users are retarded and stupid.I'm sick of puppy users, I'm going somewhere else where I don't to hear anything about pups and dogs and anything in between."?
Seriously?

[ozsouth]

Always struck me as strange that that guy contributed so much code, but didn't appear (under that name at least) to be on the forum.
Meanwhile, plinej has made some very good utilities & may be able to sort this out.

[bigpup]

It seems pCompress was added to Puppy by the following Woof-CE commit (16 Oct 2019):

You mean it is a contribution of the same guy who left Woof-CE in December 2019 with the comment "Puppy users are retarded and stupid.I'm sick of puppy users, I'm going somewhere else where I don't to hear anything about pups and dogs and anything in between."?
Seriously?

I would look at all the lines of code in that program and make sure nothing is doing anything bad.

With that attitude, who knows what may be lurking in it.

[dimkr]

This person is responsible for many unexplained changes in woof-CE, like moving code from one directory to another, which breaks change history for files inside. This person also wrote big piles of code that clearly wasn't tested before it was merged, things like https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE/pull/3443. To make thing worse, there are some binaries in woof-CE, built by this person, and I've always wondered if any of them malicious and that's why they're not built from source by woof-CE.

Not knowing how to use git properly is one thing, but doing suspicious things and pushing untested code (with side effects like slowing down boot) is another.

You have very good reasons to read this person's code carefully and critically.

Many of the reasons why I forked woof-CE and started destroying and cleaning up things can be traced back to this person.