Hi Jerome, basically the "is the newest DOS already installed" check has to wait for the target selection. Plus it should not be necessary to use black magic* for this: I would prefer if the installer only checks if a DOS with LSM & package manager data structures is installed or not. Then other aspects of how new which package is can be handled by the package manager itself anyway.
Regarding the partition check: I agree that automatic is too dangerous. This is exactly why I suggest that even a menu option to start FDISK or FORMAT should NOT be visible by default. It should ONLY be visible after making sure that the target disk does not contain any partitions yet. In all other cases, I suggest to leave the installer and give the user full choice of what to do next - the user could start FDISK or FORMAT manually, or the user (which would be a better choice IMHO) could use GPARTED of Linux or the partition manager of Windows to non-destructively add a FAT32 partition for DOS without damaging others :-) > The Default "Quick and Friendly” version will NOT offer a list > of drive targets. However, it may make it into the advanced mode > at some point. You could make C:\FDOS the default and still make the field editable, to avoid having too many easy/advanced differences. Cheers, Eric PS: Checking for already installed DOS is mostly to avoid boot loops when the user forgets to remove the CD after a DOS install and reboot and even then the user may want to re-run the installer if they have forgotten some packages. > Let’s take the rare Multi-Boot scenario. Using Grub, Lilo or other boot > loader: > > BIOS drive 0x80, has windows ntfs and an extended linux, swap and fat 32 > partition. > BIOS drive 0x81, has freedos and extended fat 32 partition. > > FreeDOS will assign the drives like this: > > BIOS 0x80, ??, ??, ?? and D: > BIOS 0x81, C: and E: > > Drive C: is on 0x81 and is perfectly fine. So, drive 0x81 partition 0 needs > formatted for dos. But, this all goes away if you just ask DOS, hey is C: > formatted. Some kernel experts may want to comment on this :-) > No target folder’s will be offered in the “Quick and Easy” version. You would still have to tell the user what happens... > The architecture of the new installer won’t care what scheme of > package management is used by the Release. Then you miss many advantages of our package managers. > The “Quick and Easy” version will not offer types of backups or > id it should overwrite the old files. It will simple move the > conflicting FDOS directory to FDOS????.OLD. Acceptable, I guess... > The “Advanced” mode will offer renaming, zipping or overwritten. [and it] > Provides more detailed options and a different color scheme. As mentioned, I think you could keep everything in 1 mode: The difference would only be that the user can decide whether to accept a default and hit the "next" button or rather "advancedly" modify settings first. As you already explain, advanced just means modifying more settings. I would prefer if all possible settings are always visible, but the user at the same time is informed that they can stick to the defaults often :-) For example with a Linux installer, you would have a choice in which country you are first. Then later, a menu would show which time zone and keyboard layout are active, but for most users, this will just be an information screen. Very few would use the opportunity to MODIFY the time zone and keyboard layout. Still, it is nice that they CAN do it, without extra screens :-) > However, restricting V8PT to use no TSRs, RAM or DISK Storage and > still run as little utilities to extend batch files, doing multiple things on > the > same screen is not a viable option. I have thought of ways around this > problem. However, they either require some sort of storage or break > the vchoice, vecho… utility extension metaphor. To be honest, BAT is not a sufficiently powerful language to make user friendly menu systems. With some extra tools it is enough for the occasional "are you sure" pop-up etc. Cheers, Eric *such as having magic files specific to your distro version. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
