Change in the ProM Framework

I’ve just released a new version of the ProM Framework, version 6.9.70. It is very likely that ProM developers will need to update to this latest version of the framework, as some things will not work anymore with older versions.

This new framework includes functionality which makes it possible for ProM to check multiple package repositories, and to select the one that reacts fastest as the repository to use. This will allow us to create, for example, a mirror of the ProM package repository at QUT Brisbane. For this change, a developer does not need to update the framework.

A second change makes that older versions of the ProM Framework cannot handle the current repository of the ProM Nightly Build. This change allows us to use relative URLs in the package descriptor files, which eases the creation of a mirror. As-is, the location of repository (http://www.promtools.org/prom6/packages/) is contained in many files in the repository itself, as most of these files contains absolute URLs. As an example, consider the package descriptor file for the Log package:

<packages>
    <package name="Log" version="6.8.366" os="all" url="http://www.promtools.org/prom6/packages/Log/Log-6.8.366-all.zip" desc="Log" org="Eindhoven University of Technology" license="L-GPL" author="H.M.W. Verbeek, F. Mannhardt, S.J. van Zelst" auto="false" hasPlugins="true" logo="http://www.promtools.org/prom6/packages/prom_subtitle_hat_300.png">
        <dependency org="prom" name="ProM-Plugins" rev="latest" changing="true" transitive="true"/>
        <dependency org="prom" name="ApacheUtils" rev="latest" changing="true" transitive="true"/>
        <dependency org="prom" name="BasicUtils" rev="latest" changing="true" transitive="true"/>
        <dependency org="prom" name="Widgets" rev="latest" changing="true" transitive="true"/>
        <dependency org="prom" name="Saxon" rev="latest" changing="true" transitive="true"/>
    </package>
</packages>

Note that both the “url” and the “logo” attributes use absolute URLs.

The sole exception is now the new version of the ProM Framework, which uses relative URLs:

<packages>
    <package name="ProM-Framework" version="6.9.70" os="all" url="ProM-Framework/ProM-Framework-6.9.70-all.zip" desc="ProM-Framework" org="Eindhoven University of Technology" license="GPL" author="H.M.W. Verbeek" auto="false" hasPlugins="true" logo="prom_subtitle_hat_300.png">
    </package>
</packages>

As a result of this, older versions of the ProM Framework cannot install this ‘package’ anymore as they cannot handle the relative URLs (they assume all URLs are absolute). If you experience problems with installing this ‘package’, please update your framework to the most recent framework. Note that more packages are expected to follow suit with these relative URLs.