On 12/2/07, Aitor Santamaría <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As I see it, the fact that some DOS software is mirrored at ibiblio's
> FreeDOS repository is a privilege, not a nice present.
> Thus, it could be an idea that there is some kind of "FreeDOS logotype
> test" (LOL ;-)) meaning that some programs have passed the minimum
> requirements of:
[...]
See my other email. The "mirror" areas of ibiblio should remain mirror
areas, and not a "FreeDOS logo test". Besides, I had made arrangements
with some authors (and still do) to host their primary release zip
file on ibiblio because they did not have a web page to host it. In
these cases, it already breaks the suggestion that placement on
ibiblio is a "privilege".
But programs that are in the "distributions" can be assumed to be
re-zipped pkgs, especially so if we choose to rename them with FDP or
PKG.
> I thought of the second because the programmer could encode in that
> LSM the condition to run certain Post-Install script, that would be
> run after the package is installed. The "extended LSM" could host
> other information, that we might not exploit at this moment, but maybe
> in the future. Things like: dependencies, path to executable, path to
> a HTML-Help file (for automatic Help update), etc.
> Then there's the decission whether the FreeDOS package would be able
> to deal with these special FPF files (and deal with the versioning
> stuff, post-install script, maybe dependencies), and for standard ZIP
> packages, well, just the basic ("there exists XXX.ZIP with date YYY,
> newer than current XXX.LSM, install?").
Interestingly, at one point on FDPM we had considered adding
dependencies and post-install tasks a-la the RPM spec (%dependencies%
and %pre% and %post% sections after the "End" in the LSM.) But we
never followed up on it while I worked on FDPM.
> > 3. We may (at some later date) choose to change the FreeDOS pkg
> > directory layout. As of today, no suggestions to do this have been
> > made, but a year from now it's possible that we may want to change it.
> > I don't want to re-zip everything on ibiblio to meet the new pkg
> > standard.
>
> Perhaps it is the moment to see if the pkg structure needs a review or
> not. We could discuss about it, and settle certain "FreeDOS directory
> structure 1.0", so that programs are based on it.
>
> A clever idea that Microsoft does (for example, to allow locale in
> filenames, "C:\Program Files" is, in my system, "C:\Archivos de
> Programa\") IIRC is to use a kind of "location variable", so that for
> example, %10 would be Program Files, %11 would be Windows folder, etc.
> It would be certainly quite a lot of more work, but it could be that
> the ZIP (or FPF) does NOT have directories, but has instead a mapping
> file:
> \DISKCOPY.001 => %12\DISKCOPY.EXE
> (and in turn, %12 could be standarised to C:\FREEDOS\BIN by the
> packager program).
If we're open to discussing the pkg format, I'd like to suggest 3 things:
1. adherence to the directory layout (already defined, but probably
not well known)
2. move the LSM file out of the zip file archive, and into the zip
file comment header. This makes it easier for programs built using zip
file tools to easily read the LSM header without having to unzip part
of the archive just to read a single APPINFO/______.LSM file.
3. adherence to the LSM file format. We have a lot of LSMs out there
now that don't follow the LSM format very well. We should either move
back to what the LSM spec actually says, or agree that we're
abandoning it and choose some other file format for pkg info.
-jh
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