Pack VS Vcpkg

The `pack`[0] compression utility that reached the HN front page the other day[1] is setting off my alarm bells right now. (It was at the time too, but now doubly so)

It's written in Pascal, and the only (semi-)documented way to build it yourself is to use a graphical IDE, and pull in pre-compiled library binaries (stored in the git repo of a dependency which afaict Pack is the only dependent of - appears to be maintained by the same pseudonymous author but from a different account).

I've opened an issue[2] outlining my concerns. I'm certainly not accusing them of having backdoored binaries, but if I was setting up a project to be deliberately backdoorable, it'd look a lot like this.

[0] https://pack.ac/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39793805

[2] https://github.com/PackOrganization/Pack/issues/10

re: C/C++ development: anybody using conda/pixi for dependency management? Here's an example of compiling a C++ SDL program using pixi and the SDL dependency from conda-forge [1].

Seems viable as a replacement for things like vckpg [2] which only builds from source.

I'm still researching this but it seems like rattler [3] is the tool to use to build/publish packages. The supported repos are: prefix.dev's own hosting, anaconda.org, artifactory or a self-hosted server.

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1: https://github.com/prefix-dev/pixi/blob/main/examples/cpp-sd...

2: https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg

3: https://prefix-dev.github.io/rattler-build/latest/authentica...

5.4.5 can be compromised

https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/issues/37197

vcpkg may expire assets after 1.5 years, so achieve long-term reproducibility you will need to cache your dependencies.... Somewhere. Not sure what the expected solution is.

https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/pull/30546#issuecomment-1...

There were various approaches recommended depending on our language and ecosystem. My classmates who developed using Node.js were recommended npm, and PyPI or poetry for Python. Since my program is written in C++, I was recommended to look into one of vcpkg or conan, but I ultimately did not use either package manager.

Which dependencies are not in vcpkg? We can ask them to add it. It’s pretty easy just open an issue there https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/issues .

./vcpkg search netcdf gdal[netcdf] Enable NetCDF support minc 2.4.03#3 MINC - Medical Image NetCDF or MINC isn't netCDF minc[minc1] Support minc1 file format, requires NETCDF netcdf-c 4.8.1#2 A set of self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support th... netcdf-c[dap] Build with DAP remote access client support netcdf-c[hdf5] Build with HDF5 support netcdf-c[nczarr] Build with NCZarr cloud storage access support netcdf-c[nczarr-zip] Build with NCZarr ZIP support netcdf-c[netcdf-4] Build with netCDF-4 support netcdf-c[platform-default-features] Enable platform-dependent default features netcdf-c[tools] Build utilities netcdf-cxx4 4.3.1#4 a set of machine-independent data formats that support the creation, acces... The result may be outdated. Run `git pull` to get the latest results. If your port is not listed, please open an issue at and/or consider making a pull request. - https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg/issues

The hyperscan update to vcpkg seems to have happened from 5.4.0 to 5.4.2 in this commit on Apr 20.

Dear Fictrac team, I am hoping to install Fictrac in our windows 11 x64 laptop (Visual Studio 2019, cMake 3.26.4). I followed the installation guideline on github page fictrac and used the latest vcpkg