Hi Tom, > On Dec 28, 2018, at 11:36 AM, Tom Ehlert <t...@drivesnapshot.de> wrote: > > Hi Jerome, > > >> We are still hard at work on the upcoming FreeDOS 1.3. > it would be cool to know who 'we’ is
That is a tricky one. I guess it all depends on what part of 1.3 is being referenced. Obviously, the OS is made up from software from many people and their contributions to the OS. Thank you for your personal efforts. The FreeDOS Community providing language translations, testing and such things. Rugxulo does a lot of software mirroring and some package updates. Jim does all of the high level stuff. OS goals and included package decisions. Things like deciding we will have a LiveCD for 1.3. Going over licenses and deciding what stays and what goes. It can be tedious and time consuming. Me, more package repo updates, installer and assembling the install media. >> But, I just couldn't help sharing something really cool about the >> new version. It has a completely new release build process. It can >> even create stock or custom releases on compatible cloud hosting. > > after watching the video (mostly) I think this build process is > somewhat over engineered. > > I had expected some smart batches, that do some COPY, XCOPY, ZIP, and > finally build a .ISO. > > to learn that I need a cloud machine, some linux distro, pearl, > python, and what not to build a DOS install medium is unexpected. > > if this would be the UBUNTU distribution, fine. > > FreeDOS 1.3, not so much. > > Tom The build process for 1.2 & 1.3 are / were dynamic. The release is configured and built based on settings in FDI. Things like OS name, version, packages and such are configured there and used for creating the release. That requires quite a bit of scripting somewhere. Excluding the ISO's, the build process for FreeDOS 1.2 was entirely DOS based. In fact, some if the media for it includes a batch FDIDEV.BAT. That batch will convert the existing computer or virtual machine into a FreeDOS 1.2 release building environment that could exactly reproduce the 1.2 release or build a custom release. Since the FreeDOS installer is batch based, 1.2 required some extremely complex batch work powered mostly by V8Power Tools. A lot of stuff regarding multi-language, keyboards and packages are processed and converted during the release build. This could be done on the fly by the batch installer. But, that would have a huge impact on its performance. Using smart DOS batch files, from start to finish the Floppy and 2 USB images would take roughly 2-3 hours to completely build the release. Unfortunately, it was a major pain to create the CD images. That step required an extra machine or VM running Linux, some manual juggling, error prone, inflexible and really annoyed me. There were also some major limitations with the 1.2 process in regards to the USB stick images. Using a different size image, let’s say going from a 32mb to a 64mb custom LITE image was down right cumbersome. Also, updating packages for the release was painful. This involved fetching them from the repo manually. Then, getting them into the correct places in the build environment. Then, telling the builder to parse there meta-data. All of those issue have been solved in the new build process. It may be a little over-engineered and could definitely use some streamlining in a few areas. But, it is a completely automated and dynamic release building process. It’s also much faster. The new process takes about 10-15 minutes. Basically, these are the improvements the new process provides: Requires only one local or remote machine running Linux and an internet connection to fetch packages and installer sources. (only OpenSUSE and Fedora supported at present) Uses the latest repo packages. Easily change USB stick sizes. Support for multi-language package meta-data NO extra steps for CD ISOs More Developer Friendly Package Lists Less tedious and mistake prone. (Multiple steps eliminated. One command builds an entire release) A couple more release customization settings Install media package location validation and adjusting Easier for a tinkerer to make a custom release 12x faster and more robust Support to add additional media types or sizes Some other minor stuff I think, that overall, the new process is far superior to the previous one. However with all of that being said, I thought that using FreeDOS to build a FreeDOS release in 1.2 was really cool. As far as I could tell, except for one person, nobody had any interest or used that ability. But, I thought it was awesome. Perhaps, I’ll resurrect that ability in the future. Jerome
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