[clug] ATO CSI software

[Alex Ferrara]

Its tax time again (BAS), and I needed to install the ATO CSI software
on my PC... again. I decided that I would make a metapackage that I
could distribute, similar to the flashplugin-nonfree package in Ubuntu.
What I found was a little funny. Instead of typing the whole story
again, I'll just post the email I sent to the ATO tech line.

I was initially quite happy that the ATO took the time out to make a tgz
file with the essential jar files for people running an non-windows or
mac os. I'm not sure what to think at the moment though. I'll post to
the list if and when I get a reply.

aF

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To whom it may concern,

The purpose of this email is to report on a problem with the file
available for download for Linux users. The file, at first glance upon
extraction seemed ok. I read the README.txt file and successfully got
the CSI program running, as I have done in the past, under Linux. I have
tested this file personally with great success under Debian 3.1, Debian
4.0, Ubuntu 6.10, Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10.

The main problem came about when I wanted to actually make a metapackage
to automatically download the file from the ATO webserver, install it,
and configure the menu system. The first thing I did was try to open the
file License_for_CSI_Software.txt, which ended up being a binary file.
Using the *NIX tool "file", I determined that the license file was
actually a TAR (Tape Archive) file. I extracted this TAR file to find
that it contained a second set of the same CsiInstallForLinux files, but
missing the license file. I thought that I was out of luck until I tried
to open the icon. It didn't look right, as it was about 200k, which is
pretty big for a 32x32 or so icon. Again, classifying the file hinted
that it was a GZip compressed TAR file. Upon extracting this file, I
found another complete copy of the CsiInstallForLinux files, but this
time the license file was there and in tact, the icon was still missing,
and there was a new file and a new directory. The directory, named
"test" was empty, but the file "z" was another TAR file. Upon extracting
the TAR file called "z", I found what should have been at the top level,
a complete copy of the jar files, license, icon and readme file.

I have converted the Windows "ICO" icon file to a more generic "XPM" X
Pixmap file and included it in a new distributable file. I would
appreciate if you would include the "XPM" icon in your linux
distributable download, as it is more useful than a windows icon.

To sum up, there was about 4 copies of similar files, and some files
were not what you would expect them to be. The file available for
download is 5,858,463 bytes, and the new archive I created, along with a
Linux friendly icon is 978,140 bytes. This can be confirmed by your IT
people, and checking the MD5 sums of the files will prove that I have
not modified any of the ATO provided files. Simply distributing the tar
file that I have attached will solve the problem.

Please let me know if this has been helpful.

Regards

Alex Ferrara
Director
Receptive IT Solutions
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