Rifiuti2 0.7.0 released

Posted on Updated

Another prolonged “hiatus” passed before this update. Quite a lot was done recently; right now there aren’t many features left before its completion in my opinion. 1

Character display fix

Perhaps the most time spent on this release is handling various character sets, and have them display correctly; it was always a headache battling with various character conversion implementations, and there’s another hurdle with displaying characters correctly under older Windows’ archaic console (it gets significantly better since Windows 10). Right now the later part is not complete yet; error messages would still be garbled if one changes console code page, which would (hopefully) be addressed soon.

95 / NT support

Other than the usual bug fixes, this release is more like one for archaeological and research purpose. Almost nobody uses ancient Windows (95, NT 4.0 etc) for work and personal computing purposes now. I can only generate recycle bin artifacts for those systems using virtual machines. But still, they provide an interesting historical insight on how the recycle bin features change over time.

Network share support

Another feature I find exciting is setting up recycle bin on network shares. Though there was wide claim that such thing can’t be done, somebody has managed to enable it for any mapped and even unmapped network drives!

See: Enable Recycle Bin on mapped network drives

Personally I use a more simplistic approach based on an older article, that is, move personal folders to a UNC path. It surprised me on how far this feature is dated back; Windows ME and 2000 was verified to work! Windows 98 would ask for permanent deletion of personal files in UNC path though.

Others

Last but not least, there are a few important changes in bundled Windows binaries:

  • It doesn’t work on Windows XP/2003 anymore, due to glib library (the underlying library rifiuti2 relies heavily on) breaking XP compatibility by using Vista-only API at certain point.
  • File output is always in UTF-8 encoding now (without BOM). Users are expected to open it with UTF-8 capable text editors.
  • 32 and 64 bit binaries are bundled as separated zip files. On the surface it means less bloat, though this change actually arised from need of compromise for Windows building platform (Appveyor, that is).

  1. Given current technology trend, similar artifact carving tools may not be very relevant now. ☹ Actually it was already the case for like 10 years ago, when people started relying on web services and mobile communication. ↩