Hi Mike, > On Apr 19, 2025, at 3:36 PM, Michael Brutman <mbbrut...@brutman.com> wrote: > > Hi Jerome, > > Congrats on getting back to the more technical side of the project. > > I hate to ask, but how much of this is documented? You might find another > project and not want to be the distro maintainer forever ...
Hmmm, trying to get rid of me? LOL. Documentation could and is getting a little better... When I started this there was really no documentation on how to do any of if it. At that time, there was only an LSM specification and a utility for indexing packages in a repository. Almost none of the packages adhered to that LSM specification. The indexing tool did not come with any documentation. It has been a long time since I’ve used it. I could be wrong but, I don’t think it even has a help screen. Everything was really just done by hand. There was not any real help with that. It was just things you had to either intuitively know or be able to figure out. But, we are not talking rocket science. While extremely tedious, it was not hard to figure out. However, it was prone to inconsistencies and errors. Since that time, a lot has changed. I have implemented some things and created several utilities that streamline and automate much throughout the entire workflow. As such, it permits us the ability to provide things like the monthly interim test builds. Most of the tools are fairly straight forward and contain help screens. Each are several major versions on since their initial creation. With each such iteration, they have become much more powerful and simpler to use. Once the new FDRepo (v3) and RBE (v4) are complete, they should be good for a very long time. It is very likely that I will have been pushing up daisies for decades before they need a major update or replaced. While I do make an effort to insure that if I become fertilizer tomorrow, they are others who know how to operate the current tools. That is not really the point you are trying to make. The current generation FDRepo (v2) and RBE (v3) are fairly easy to use, contain some help information and provide enough feedback to figure out most issues that could arise. That also is not the same as having good documentation. The new version of FDRepo is easier than ever to use to manage a repository once it has been configured. But, I have been intentionally making an effort to provide more documentation for it. As for RBE (v4), it honestly won’t need it. Although it is complex monster, you will understand why when it is finished and released. After the these planned versions are finished, I think I will try to find some time to work on a “release workflow” document to explain more about the how and why aspects. While all of these tools are open source and others do know how to use them. Providing information on the actual process behind it all is a great idea. Much better than having black-box one give them to black-box two and black-box three to get a finished product. :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
