Does the --background option exist for Windows?

[Daniel Lenski]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2023 at 10:47 AM Paolo Ienne (严保罗) <paolo.ienne at ieee.org> wrote:

> But I am writing to ask if it is correct that the Windows port of
> OpenConnect does not offer the "--background" switch. It seems so (I
> finally managed to access the latest build for Windows 10, thinking that
> the slighter older one did not have it yet but newer might) but I find
> this mentioned nowhere.

This issue was opened on GitLab 1 week ago:
https://gitlab.com/openconnect/openconnect/-/issues/655

There's also a merge request in progress attempting to add
`--background` on Windows. This is difficult due to the fact that
Windows uses a very different process model from POSIX-y systems.

> Last but not least, you may want to note that the links to "master branch for
> 32-bit Windows or for 64-bit Windows" on
>
>   https://www.infradead.org/openconnect/packages.html
>
> are broken.

See the discussions on
https://gitlab.com/openconnect/openconnect/-/issues/498 and
https://gitlab.com/openconnect/openconnect/-/issues/621

It's very hard to convince GitLab's CI to persist the artifacts that
it builds for us, and the required URL format keeps changing. 🤕

> The "Fedora dwmw2/openconnect COPR" mentioned in the next
> paragraph actually work--although it was a bit of an adventure to manage to
> unpack the multiple layers of archives and compressions to finally get to the
> single meaningful file inside the RPM.

Yep, the COPR links *are* stored reliably, but it is indeed difficult
to extract those files, and it'll definitely scare away some Windows
users
https://gitlab.com/openconnect/openconnect/-/issues/498#note_1128691313

Daniel