Hi Jim, > 1. Not all developers care about FreeDOS pkg structure. > And it would be inappropriate of me to re-zip their release
Would it? I mean if you want the original structure, you download from the developer's homepage. When I look at getdeb.net and rpmfind.net, I see packages which follow a distro and ignore the developer all over the place, but of course I also get URLs where I can get original TGZs. FreeDOS is not only a kernel, it is also a distro, and the only way you can ship a package as part of the distro is to put it in FreeDOS pkg compatible structure first :-). > put zip files on ibiblio that cannot be included on the FreeDOS > distribution because they are not free for all... You are right. The updater can make use of extra "nonfree" repositories outside ibiblio, while our ISOs gotta be free. > 2. There are historical versions on ibiblio. Does your suggestion > imply that users should be able to find a historical version of a > program that interests them, and should be able to install it using > the pkg directory structure? No, not at all. Sorry for being unclear about that point. I was only suggesting to repackage new versions in fdpkg compatible format before uploading them to ibiblio. My assumption is that the installer only automates getting the newest version and only if it is newer than at least FreeDOS 1.0 (or maybe even 1.1). Older versions do not have to be repackaged and I assume that a user who wants to install them will do so manually without using the updater :-). > I don't want to re-zip everything on ibiblio to meet the new pkg > standard. The standard is not new - I only suggest to re-zip everything which will be part of FreeDOS 1.1, because there is not other choice. You need zips in fdpkg format for every single package which will be on the ISO, and we need helpers for that task. For the beta9 and 1.0 distros, Bernd and Blair had to do most of this work themselves, and it is a lot of work because there are many packages and because quite a few are not already in fdpkg format when you download them from the developer's page. And whenever I want a version of a package which is not on one of the ISOs, I run the risk of having to unzip to a temp dir and putting each file into a nice place manually to install, so at least I myself would appreciate if more things on ibiblio become available in fdpkg format in the future. As said, that only affects future updates, not archived versions :-). Things like Arachne have been using adjusted directory structures and can stay like that: It uses %dosdir%/arachne/... because putting all arachne files in bin/ would overwhelm bin/, yet there are fdpkg compatible bin/arachne,bat and appinfo/arachne.lsm :-). > 4. Others who "roll their own distro" for themselves or for a distro > they make available to others may not want to use our pkg directory > layout, but instead go with something slightly different. Even those will have an easier life when all packages are in one unified package format before they start to roll them into their distro's preferred format. At the moment, packages at ibiblio are often in unknown / arbitrary format, and you have to look at every single package before you can "risk" unzipping it in %dosdir%. > But of all the above, #1 is the most significant and will be the > reason we will not get 100% of all zip files into pkg format. As said - for every single distro ISO of FreeDOS, be it in the past or in the future, somebody first had to put one version of each of the 100% of all packages into fdpkg format before putting it on ISO. > > Suggestion: wget -O choicex.zip http://foo/bar/choice-4.4-binary.zip > Your suggestion works well when the package title is 7 characters or > less. But [...] Diskcopy [...] You are right. Yet "pkg/choice.zip" is still a lot better than illegible shorthands like dkcp815x.zip :-). And package titles are never more than 8 chars long for the simple reason that the title is usually the name of the main executable which has an 8+3 style name :-). So my next suggestion is to drop the X and S suffixes from the name of the zip in the working directory of the installer :-). > suppose there is no reason for FDUPDATE to save the pkg to a > recognizable filename. After all, it's only downloading You are right, but what I have in mind are people who use the repository for manual updates. As said, fdpkg zips are much easier to install than arbitrarily formatted zips. Humans will NOT be happy about http...choic44x.zip when they google for them. They WILL be happy about http...choice-44-binary.zip though :-). Remember that it is far from normal that FreeDOS installations are on networked computers. Systems like Ubuntu and Windows now almost force you to have fast (!) internet for updates but for DOS many users will be interested in downloading files using another PC or another operating system and then later, offline, using them to update their DOS. Remember that there are no INF files for FreeDOS, so users typically install network drivers after they have installed DOS and worked with it for a while, instead of throwing in a driver CD during the install process or having a big collection of drivers on the distro CD already. The latter is not possible for FreeDOS because licenses of DOS network drivers often do not let us include drivers on the CD. Eric :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
