IzPack 5.0.0 RC5 available

After the detour of moving from Codehaus hosting, the IzPack team and contributors are finally proud to present the 5th release candidate of IzPack 5.0.

Thanks to all of you guys which made this happen and helped by sending pull requests with code changes and those of you which improved the documentation. Not to forget about the users testing snapshots and sending JIRA issues and comments in the mailing lists.

IzPack 5.0.0 RC5 brings you just a couple of improvements and bug fixes, even a small set of new features with an uncritical implementation which should not break any existing environment. The migrated new documentation is considered to be up to date.
Unfortunately I haven't got reimported the JIRA issues from Codehaus to our new cloud instance at Atlassian.
Be aware of the fact that although it is considered stable according to the user reports and many automatic unit and integration tests, IzPack 5 release candidates still serve for the purpose of testing and reporting.

Version 5.0.0 RC5  is intended to be the last one in the series of 5.0 release candidates. If there won't be any complaints there will follow up a 5.0.0 final release soon.

Changes

Here's the list of noteworthy changes against 5.0 RC4:

New features:

• IZPACK-1229: Filter for lowercase and uppercase
• IZPACK-1219: Allow installer to expire on specified date
• IZPACK-1195: Improve and enhance displaying of readonly UserInputPanels

Improvements of existing features:

• IZPACK-1248: UserInputPanel - "custom" input field layout improvements for console/GUI installers
• IZPACK-1247: Console installer - no title displayed for warning/error messages in comparison to GUI installer
• IZPACK-1231: AntActionsInstallerListener: Improve error handling and messageboxes
• IZPACK-1207: Make TargetPanel.warn ("The directory already exists! Are you sure you want to install here and possibly overwrite existing files?") message optional
• IZPACK-1201: Split user input field attribute "set" into "set" and "default"
• IZPACK-1200: Allow default value overrides of dynamic variables from the <variables> section
• IZPACK-1199: Don't refresh a dynamic variable if it has been set by the user on a UserInputPanel
• IZPACK-1173: Make single-instance locking of the installer configurable

Bugfixes:

• IZPACK-1250: Installer with '(1)' in the file name cause generated uninstaller to fail
• IZPACK-1249: UserInputPanel - "custom" type input field - Swing button labels "Add"/"Remove" not translated
• IZPACK-1245: Console installer: panel DataValidator emitting a WARNING called three times before the panel switches
• IZPACK-1242: Dynamic variable definitions with the same name and conditionid overwritten, although applying different filters for each of them
• IZPACK-1241: Builds using custom packaging type izpack-jar sometimes fail after fresh IzPack snapshot deployments
• IZPACK-1240: Message boxes after validation failures cannot be closed using ENTER, but just by ESC, SPACE or clicking on the Close button
• IZPACK-1239: HostAddressValidator not working as expected
• IZPACK-1238: UserInputPanel: input fields not focused automatically on panel activation
• IZPACK-1234: Usage of variables for pack content
• IZPACK-1232: PacksConsolePanel prints the id of the packs in console mode, not the localized pack names
• IZPACK-1228: Defining an unknown filter in dynamic variable is silently ignored
• IZPACK-1227: NullPointerException in ConfigurationInstallerListener, if patchFile hasn't been defined in the descriptor
• IZPACK-1226: ConfigurationInstallerListener does not remove entries as configured
• IZPACK-1225: IzPack 5.0rc3 Compile error Unable to create directory
• IZPACK-1224: Build failing - maven 3.2.5, JDK 1.6 on Windows 7
• IZPACK-1222: Some text is hardcoded in english in console classes
• IZPACK-1218: Dynamic variables: escape="false" ignored for reading values from configuration files
• IZPACK-1216: Dynamic Variables with conditions depending on a dynamic variable
• IZPACK-1215: cyclic reference does produce a loop
• IZPACK-1214: File/Dir fields with property readonly=true problems in Console mode
• IZPACK-1212: UserInputPanel: Radio defaults apply just for the first radio field on one and the same panel
• IZPACK-1211: UserInputPanel: Missing variable resolution in attribute <field><spec text="..."/><field> including the according translations
• IZPACK-1210: IzPack cannot build with JDK 8
• IZPACK-1206: PacksConsolePanel does auto-select and skip conditioned packs if the conditions evaluate true
• IZPACK-1205: UserInputPanel: displayHidden and readonly attribute flaws
• IZPACK-1203: UserInputPanel choice fields (radio, combo) with conditions on each don't use current condition state
• IZPACK-1202: NPE in AndCondition due to a bad condition definition
• IZPACK-1194: "contains" condition does not work for checking plain <variable> values
• IZPACK-1191: misspelling laf name results in NullPointerException
• IZPACK-1182: Evaluation of dynamic variables, which depends on another one, fails
• IZPACK-1180: ConfigurationInstallerListener: Nested <entry> remains empty if it didn't exist before
• IZPACK-1178: Cannot create shortcuts on unix platforms.
• IZPACK-1177: AutomationHelper not found
• IZPACK-1176: Maven Dependencies in izpack-native-* still refer to 5.0.0-rc3-SNAPSHOT
• IZPACK-1175: Class is a raw type. References to generic type Class<T> should be parameterizedSub-task
• IZPACK-1160: Dynamic variables unset if none of a couple of dynamic variable definitions fits conditions although set in UserInputPanel

I've added a single page and a RSS feed exported from the previous Codehaus JIRA (which isn't accessible any longer) to the web site.

Compiling

The IzPack sources and the IzPack Maven plugin is tested to be compatible to Maven up to version 3.2.5. This release is the first one no longer supporting Maven 2.2.1, because this would confuse the deployments and introduce additional maintainance in the code. The minimum Maven version required is now 3.0.

IzPack is still considered to be compiled and deployed based on JDK 6.  Due to the backward compatibility of laster JDK versions there's currently still no reason to increase, while it works.

Testing

Feel free to test and report bugs, either to one of the proper mailing lists or if you can file an issue currently just at the our Github issue tracker. The new Atlassian JIRA instance is still in maintainance and new issues might get lost. I will drop a note as soon as the import of the old issues is fine or whether we'll start just with a clean JIRA content.

Please check also the project website hosted at Github (the izpack.org domain is still kindly owned and donated by the project founder - thank you Julien).

Regarding the migration out of Codehaus I will drop another post, the documentation of the new services is almost done.


Enjoy the new version 5.0.0 RC5 and keep in touch.