FW Editor: How much time did you work for PackageForge? How did you come up with the idea for it?
Daniel Persson: I got the idea when I was working at UIQ Technology as a Software Engineer developing Symbian applications. I noticed how troublesome and complicated certain tasks were and felt there was a need for better software tools.
The initial development started with only myself at the beginning of 2009. At most we were 5 members of the team with 2 programmers for a couple of months. Feature creep and other problems came in between so we didn't release PackageForge until late spring 2010.
FW Editor: Can you use PackageForge on Mac OS too?
Daniel Persson: No. The Symbian SDK only works for Windows at the moment so there were no need to support more platforms. This may change in the future however at which point we may port it to Mac OS X or Linux as well.
FW Editor: How does exactly PackageForge works? It's there any hidden part you want to share with us?
Daniel Persson: At its simplest form it's a graphical front-end to the command line tools makesis and signsis which are included in the Symbian SDK. One might incorrectly think that this is 'just a GUI wrapper'. It really isn't.
PackageForge conforms to the .pkg file format used by makesis, but all other features are implemented in the application itself to really simplify and abstract as much of the technical details as possible.
FW Editor: When PackageForge builds logs, it 'translates' the errors into more user friendly messages. How did you make that possible?
Daniel Persson: This was actually quite tricky. The error messages from makesis and signsis is very limited and not user-friendly. Some errors can't even be understood without low-level details about the encryption routines themselves.
To make it more user friendly PackageForge reads the output from makesis and signsis and then looks for certain patterns which it then translates to a much more user friendly alternative.
But as I said, the error messages are not user friendly. So to understand certain errors we had to do extensive testing with all kinds of problems to find the meaning of the errors and find a user friendly message to replace it with.
FW Editor: Can we build packages for any version of Symbian installed on a phone using PackageForge?
Daniel Persson: You can build packages for Symbian 9.x and onwards, including Symbian^1, Symbian^2 and Symbian^3.
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