Hi Eric, > On Jul 5, 2020, at 10:40 AM, Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi Jerome, > > it worries me that you SILENTLY dropped a newer fdisk and > switched to an older version because they both have bugs, > but the older version has less bad bugs. Please explain all > bugs which you have encountered and what keeps us from using > a fixed even newer FDISK version.
As for the 131, I honestly don’t recall the exact problem it was having. But, it isn’t the default version anyway. The FDISK package or FreeDOS has FDISK.EXE (v1.21) and FDISK131.EXE. I was quite busy and did not do a bug report. Even though the FDISK source is partway into the simple process of supporting multi-language. it hasn’t been updated in over 11 years. So, I don’t think my un-issued bug report is much of a loss. All I really remember, is when telling FDISK131 to activate a partition from the command line, it would sometimes return an errorlevel despite that 121 could then do it without issue. The main install media (CD,USB etc) has and does use the default version (121) instead of the “beta” 131 version. The Floppy Edition will just do the same. This brings up a side point… With a few exceptions, no one seems very interested in fixing any bugs in any of the packages that are included with FreeDOS. I’m not trying to accuse anyone or point any fingers. It is just a general observation. I wish I had the spare time to fix other peoples bugs. But, my plate is overflowing with FreeDOS related stuff already. Updating and maintaining multiple utilities required by the installers, improving multiple installers, maintaining all of the different release media, trying to improve the state of multi-language support, updating some software packages and more… Any one of those could be a full time job for someone. It really quit a bit of juggling. > About the space savings: 20-30 kB for fdisk ini files and > 44 kB for a duplicate file is quite a lot. I do not think > it should be that hard to work with just 1 copy of the file. It should’t be. I just haven’t got to that yet. > UPX (remember to use --8086 here) saves only a few kB, as > your tools are many small files which compress less than > fewer, larger files would. > > Of course I still do not really understand what SLICER can do > but it seems to be optimized for usage during 8086 installs. Comparing SLICER to other archivers is like comparing Ubuntu to macOS. Sure you can do almost everything in either one and there are many similarities. But once you get beneath the surface, they are nearly completely different. And each has their own benefits and shortcomings. Just SOME examples of the interactions between the installer and SLICER… The installer detects support for i686 (or better cpu) tells SLICER extract all files tagged with i686. The installer detects its running in VirtualBox, passes the i686 tag and a VirtualBox tag to SLICER. This results in all the i686 stuff and the Networking package to be installed. The installer only sees support for a 286, then SLICER only installs stuff that works on a 286 or less machine. Combining and removing tags could result in near endless possible combinations. SOURCES, BINARIES, TEXT DOCS and on and on and on. PLEASE NOTE: the installer can be told to override detection and install a specific set of packages. But by default, it only installs software the system can run. SLICER can embed multi-language text and EULA agreements that can be displayed during archive extraction. (language specific and tag based as well) And many more differences. > > About UNZIP (sure there is no 8086 variant?), FIND, GREP, > DEBUG, WHICHFAT, MORE etc., EDIT / TED3, MODE, CHKDSK… There may be forks, versions or variants of UNZIP that are 8086/8088 compatible. But, it would require a lot more overhead in the installer to achieve the same functionality as with the system used for SLICER. On top of that, UNZIP is nearly 200K. Grep is 386+. As for most the others, I would need to check my previous results to see what those versions require. > Even when the disk is just a tool itself for installation, > it can be very useful to have some self-help applications at > hand, as the TED3 text editor or DEBUG. I think FIND and MODE > would not hurt either, unless you prefer GREP instead of FIND. Sure. But, why can’t the user add what they need? If I put MORE, CHKDSK, GREP or whatever on the diskette image and left 2K free, how could a user that needed to put BOBASAPI.SYS know what (if anything) they remove to fit there text to speech driver? Overall, I think it is just easier for everyone to let the end-user decide what extras they may want on the diskette. > You say people with CD drives should prefer the CD version: > > I say people with CD drives can not necessarily boot from it > and people with modern hardware do not necessarily still have > a CD drive. In both cases, CD/DVD drivers, caches and drivers > to mount ISO files without needing physical CD help a lot :-) That is why there is a Boot Floppy for the CD installer. The Floppy Edition is not meant to be used to boot then run a different installer. > > Also, if you have user interaction, it helps to have MKEYB and > (if mouse interaction is relevant) CTMOUSE around. Both are a > lot smaller than COUNTRY SYS which I doubt that you would need. Probably just pull COUNTRY.SYS in favor of MKEYB. The mouse is not used buy the installer or any of the default supplied utilities. So, CTMOUSE isn’t needed. > You probably do not need FDAPM on 8086 at all. If you think you > need it to reboot, I think FDISK also has that feature for you. I only had it there for the alias shortcuts to shutdown and such. But you are correct, FDISK can issue a reboot. However, several V8Power Tools have that ability and are what is used to reboot. > > Regards, Eric The Floppy Edition is “a work in progress” So once all of my initial goals are met, who knows where it will lead. In many ways the it is more advanced than the main install media. It also has a far wider range of support for different installation scenarios. For example, it can redistributed to different sized diskettes. A user had moved it onto 1.2Mib diskettes almost immediately after release. It can be xcopied into a subdirectory and installed from there onto the same (or another) drive. :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
