On Sun, Feb 20, 2022 at 4:16 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: [..] > I'm sure we'll want to discuss "1.4" or "2.0" or whatever version > comes after 1.3. (I can start a new conversation next week to talk > about that.)
Now that FreeDOS 1.3 has been out for a little while, I wanted to start thinking about what comes next. Let's use this thread to discuss it. What would you like to see changed or added (or removed) in the next distribution? My top three ideas: 1. Move to a "rolling release" It's taken several years* to release a new version of FreeDOS. Yes, DOS is pretty stable, so we don't need a new distribution very often anyway. But for many folks, the new official distribution is the only way they get the updated tools (most people don't download individual tools to update a running FreeDOS system.) *Not counting Release Candidates, the last few releases were: 1.0 (2006) - 1.1 (2012) - 1.2 (2016) - 1.3 (2022) I think it would be interesting to set up a system that builds a new FreeDOS "test" distribution whenever we update packages on the FreeDOS Files Archive at Ibiblio. That doesn't need to be a new build every night, but maybe every month. I think these distributions would come in only two versions: a "full" FreeDOS that looks like the LiveCD (see also #3 below) and a "mini" FreeDOS that contains just the FreeDOS "Base" packages, without source code. (The "mini" should be very tiny, and basically the same as a "floppy" FreeDOS install .. I guess "floppy" is a third distro version, but I think it could be derived from the "mini.") Folks can try out the new "test" distribution and always be on the latest version. When things are stable, we can choose a "snapshot" that works well, and make that the next official distribution. That might happen on some interval (every 6 months? 12 months?). 2. Simplify FreeDOS The FreeDOS distribution has grown. We've added a bunch of packages over the years, and FreeDOS has become quite large. We added the BonusCD (634MB) because we couldn't fit everything on the LiveCD (401MB). Over time, we added some things because they were useful at the time, but we added others because they were a neat thing to have. Are these useful in 2022? I think we should re-evaluate what's in FreeDOS, and trim down what we include. DOS should not be that big. For example: I think the Unix-like utilities should go. I thought the Unix-like tools might generate interest from new developers, but I think the Unix-like tools just confuse things and make FreeDOS look like a "mini Linux." Let's just be DOS. I think we can also remove some packages from Editors, Archivers, and Utilities. We might remove all of the Graphical Desktops, since these are of limited usefulness and not maintained anyway. What packages to keep and remove is probably a larger discussion that we could move into a dedicated thread. The full list of packages (LiveCD and BonusCD) is in the FreeDOS 1.3 report document: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/official/report.html 3. Make LiveCD the default We know from the 2021 user survey** that a lot of people run FreeDOS in a virtual machine. Why require an "installation" if you just want to boot FreeDOS and run it in a VM? I think we could set up the LiveCD so that you can just boot it and run FreeDOS. **Here's the user survey: http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Survey/2021 Imagine setting up a new VM with FreeDOS. You download the LiveCD, define a new VM, point the VM at the LiveCD (or the "mini" FreeDOS CD), and boot. Now you're running FreeDOS. You don't have to *install* to a hard drive to run FreeDOS; run everything from the LiveCD. If you want workspace to edit files, set up a virtual disk in your VM, then use FDISK and FORMAT so you can use it. You don't have to install it to the disk; you can just use the disk for files. But I think we should still have some kind of "install" available for those who really do want to install FreeDOS to the hard drive, such as folks who want to run on real hardware. Using the LiveCD this way probably also means looking closely at the packages we include. We'd need to be able to run everything from that read-only media, so programs that require updating files in their "home" directory will not work here. I think all of these changes suggest the next FreeDOS should be "FreeDOS 2.0" instead of something like "1.4." It's a big change to how we set up FreeDOS in the 1.x series, so it deserves a bump up to "2.0." What do you think? Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
