Hi there! I've discussed this topic with Jim out of the list, and decided to bring it onlist, as it has no real 'ultimate answer', and requires to know 'how people store their stuff on FreeDOS'.
Now, what is it about: FreeDOS packages are/were used primarily to package the FreeDOS system. The principle is simple: just take the zip, unzip it in %DOSDIR%, and generate a %DOSDIR%\packages\pkgname.lst file list to keep track of what happened. But the packaging system could be (in fact, is already) also useful to package software not strictly related to the FreeDOS core - for example games, GNU tools, drivers, media players, whatever. All these have historically been unzipped in: %DOSDIR%\games\pkgname (for games) %DOSDIR%\pkgname (for everything else) This is at least what FreeDOS 1.0 does, and what I do myself on FDNPKG v0.9 repositories. Having this much stuff in %DOSDIR% is not really clean - %DOSDIR% should probably be used only for OS-specific files. Plus, some people prefer to keep their games, applications, etc on an entirely different disks or partitions (which is impossible using a single %DOSDIR% path). Question to you - users of FreeDOS - how would you like software to be packaged? I believe stating it once for all and making it a 'standard FreeDOS rule' is highly necessary, to avoid any new packaging revolutions in the future. I see two possibilities: 1. use %DOSDIR% for FreeDOS system, and other variables for other kind of software (eg. %APPSDIR%, %GAMESDIR%, etc). This will require to store an additional flag/marker somewhere to know what the package contains (system stuff, games, or what). 2. Make the packager scan the filelist of the packages, and make it understand that whenever a file begins with 'games/' it's meaning in fact %GAMESDIR%, whenever it sees 'apps/, it redirects to %APPSDIR%, etc... otherwise use %DOSDIR%. This is probably much more backward compatible. 2b. To avoid troubles in future, we could say that everything that starts with 'dosdir/' is redirected to %DOSDIR%, and anything else will be catched by the packager that will tell the user it got an unknown kind of package. This however will brake FreeDOS 1.0 packages. But on the other hand, it provides the 'soft type flag' right into the filename path, so no additional field is required. Plus, we could say that the first subdirectory is the env variable name to follow, then we don't need to make a static list of all possible software types upfront, and if/when the packager encounters a future type that doesn't relates to any already-existing variable, if would just tell the user, 'hey, this package tries to install itself into "BOZOSTUFF/", but I lack a %BOZOSTUFF% variable! My preference goes toward 2b, but this is kind of a personal preference, therefore I'd like to know how you all feel about it before implementing anything in FDNPKG. Maybe there are other neat solutions that I am unaware of. Tell me. Another question: how are you storing your files on your FreeDOS systems? As far as I'm concerned, I usually store games in a separate directory, and other stuff under a 'programs' directory. But maybe other categories would be needed? (like 'devel', 'emulator', etc...?) tschüss, Mateusz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;258768047;13503038;j? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
