Hi Jerome, Jayden, Rugxulo, Jim, Matheusz, others! Some more thoughts: > I don’t see a way to install the KERNEL.SYS without updating the > boot sector. But, should always at least ask to back stuff up.
Read the output of SYS /? or the HTMLHELP page about SYS or the readme of SYS to find such ways... ;-) Actually HTMLHELP is so useful that I even had it as part of a floppy distro once :-) Plus it can process HTML help files inside ZIPs, saving space. > I think adding stuff to a boot menu for Windows, grub, lilo or > whatever is way beyond the scope of a batch based installer. We had it for Win 9x / XP but things were simpler back then. New Windows lives on NTFS and Linux lives on yet other FS. Even back in the 9x / XP times, things were not actually simple enough to do this automatically in foolproof ways! > With basically two choices: > > Full install > > or > > Full install with sources. Well he proposed "big" and "small" install. After a small (only all "base" packages) install, you can still use the package manager to install more packages. Note that real installing is more than just UNZIP, so if possible use the real FDNPKG, as UNZIP just approximates installing. The "big" install just installs all packages for you... Note that small install means only the base category and that MS DOS never included more than that category. Users often got confused about this and thought BASE would be only kernel and command.com, so they thought that FULL would be a very good choice, ending up with a huge pile of software that they never used. The installer should be clear about this. As said, you can always do BASE and later add a few packages of your choice manually anyway. Regarding the source code, I think "installing" them was better limited to copying source tarballs or zips, as it was done by some Linux distros. You can then unzip those few zips for which you ACTUALLY want to edit the sources without cluttering your harddisk with lots of tiny files that you would get by unzipping all source zips at once. In any case, INSIDE the "386+" case, apart from deciding which packages to install (make that easy: base or all), you decide WHERE. The WHERE has at least 3 situations in my opinion: Existing C: drive, interactively prepared C: (let the user work with FDISK and FORMAT, at own risk) and RAMDISK. The latter is not required but IMHO it is a very convenient option to have and easy to have. For a more complex wish, let the middle option detect if a target harddisk has "totally nothing" on it yet and if so, reduce warnings about FDISK / FORMAT usage or maybe even run them non-interactively. The hard part is what exactly totally nothing means: There could be some MBR already, but would it be one which can boot? In any case, if there already is some non-empty partition table, the disk is not totally empty. If the disk contains a GPT instead of MBR, it is not empty either plus you may want to avoid FDISK usage on it. For example only GPT supports harddisk sizes above 2 TB at 512 byte sector size. Plus some risk of having other sector sizes in the 1st place. When the target is USB, SD, ZIP or similar, it may be non-partitioned and still contain a single filesystem already nevertheless, which could be non-FAT but still be valuable. Think about SDXC with exFAT, do those use partition tables or do they just contain one exFAT? In such cases, you do not want to silently wipe contents. Cheers, Eric PS: I indeed agree that batch is not a very convenient installer programming language. Jim also had one in C, which OTOH was over-integrated and had built-in unzip. Bernd's install combined batch, helpers and packagers. PS Jim: For which free-non-open software would it be good to have free-open alternatives at this moment? I mean what is closed but too cool to simply forget? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
