Re: [Freedos-user] UIDE versus UHDD in freedos 1.2 - and 1.3

[Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-user]

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 6:34 AM, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote:

> Hi Mercury, some short answers :-)
> I think dates as version numbers are fine when there is no explicit version 
> numbering. I would use the date of the most recent file, leave the decision 
> to you whether that means the version is this week since YOU yourself have 
> made per-driver excerpts of the readmes. Otherwise, use the newest timestamp 
> of the original files, even in situations where only documentation updates 
> took place.

Personally, I would like to assign a new version date to my packages since I've 
made some significant changes... however, I think that also would cause 
unnecessary confusion to existing users of these programs. E.g. "Sweet, a new 
version! Oh, wait... this is the same binary I already had. :(( " So I guess 
I'll leave the versions as-is.

> Regarding sources, please always use source\NAME\FILE.EXT naming. It is no 
> problem to have separate copies of CC in source\uide\cc.asm and 
> source\uhdd\cc.asm when installed. There is an official howto for the 
> directory tree etc. in ZIP files for install friendly packages, somewhere 
> online.

Yep, I think the place to which you're referring is 
[here](http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Package), a page I already knew 
about. Had I just read a little further, I would have seen the answer to this 
problem! lol

> Having two himemx variants to compare sounds like Japheth hopes to get MANY 
> TESTERS so a new update can consolidate into one version again? Or maybe a 
> command line option to pick one of the two styles now represented by two exes?

I think it's to give users a choice, depending on their needs. He mentions they 
both employ a different strategy of allocating blocks - perhaps one is 
First-Fit and another is Best-Fit - and each strategy would work better for 
different users. So he gave them a choice. But Idk, that's just my take on it. 
:)

> I suggest that you give Jerome a signal when you think the packages on your 
> website have been updated to fix all items mentioned by him and fully fdinst 
> / fdnpkg compatible :-)

Will do. Hopefully by the end of the day!

> Thank you for your help! Regards, Eric

No problem. Glad to help!___
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Re: [Freedos-user] WinWorldPC disk images...

[Robert Riebisch]

Hi Michael,

> I'm on a CentOS 7 system. I downloaded a rar archive of Wordperfect 6.0
> dos that is an archive of floppy images. I do not at this time have real
> floppy
> support... but I do have zip disks. Is there a way I can mount these
> images and create one larger image?

This is untested for WP, but I did similar for other software sever
1) Extract the RAR archive to a Zip disk.
2) Put extracted e0x.arj to it:
http://kannegieser.net/veit/programm/index_e.htm
3) Load E0X on DOS.
4) Run WP installer.
5) Use F11/F12 keys to switch to the next/previous disk image.

Cheers,
Robert
-- 
  +++ BTTR Software +++
 Home page: https://www.bttr-software.de/
DOS ain't dead: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/


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Re: [Freedos-user] UIDE versus UHDD in freedos 1.2 - and 1.3

[Jerome Shidel]

Hi,

> On Mar 27, 2020, at 11:03 PM, Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-user 
>  wrote:
> 
> Hi Jerome, Eric!
> 
> 
> On Friday, March 27, 2020 1:16 PM, Jerome Shidel jer...@shidel.net 
>  wrote:
> 
> Hi Eric,
> I took a quick look.
> There is some minor confusion and package issues and they cannot be replace 
> the current packages “AS-IS”.
> At a glance…
> Are they all newer than the ones already in the repo?
> 
> Since the author did not assign explicit version numbers, I had been 
> generating version numbers based on the date of the most recent modification 
> in the change log section of the readme file. However, since some changes 
> were to the documentation only and did not affect the code, this resulted in 
> a newer version number than the existing package despite the included binary 
> being identical. I had listed the "makeshift" versions on my site, but not to 
> the individual LSM files in hopes I could dig up some "real" final version 
> numbers somewhere. These issues have all been fixed in the versions I 
> uploaded today - all versions listed are pulled directly from the binaries 
> themselves, the LSM files have been modified accordingly, and I also updated 
> the descriptions of the packages to further indicate the differences between 
> my packages and any existing ones on the ibiblio list.

That is understandable. 

As a side note…

The repository management utilities require a version (along with things like 
title and some other mandatory fields). The version information must be unique. 
No two packages with the same filename can have the same version. If a version 
3.34 is in the repo, you cannot add the same package as version 3.34. You would 
need to update its ism to something like 3.34b, 3.34-1, 3.34.1 or whatever. 
There is no specified format for version information. This like “5.13.19”, 
“2019-05-13”, “19-May-13 (pre-1, RP ed)” and etc are all fine.

In the ones I looked at, the Entered-date field in your packages looked fine. 
But, I figured I’d mention that it is strict format of -MM-DD. This is 
enforced by the repo management software to provide a uniform look across all 
packages.

Just some more notes on LSM metadata files.

The required Description field should be fairly short and preferably one good 
sentence to describe the package.

There are a couple addition fields the repo knows that are used for various 
things like html pages and RSS feeds. None of them are required.

Summary: A more detailed description of the package. 

Changes: Simple note on what has changed since the last version. 

Modified-date: Formatted as -MM-DD.nn and if not present will be 
automatically stamped with the current date by the repo. Eventually, this may 
be used by software instead of trying to parse version numbers. 
> For example…, RDISK shows no version in package, web page says 2011-04-25. 
> Repo version is 2015-03-05.
> 
> Can one of you point me to the existing RDisk package (and XMgr too, if one 
> exists)? I only found SRDisk on the ibiblio list.
> 

At present… 

There are two main FreeDOS software repos.

The Official FreeDOS software Repository — (html interface) 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/index.html
 

My unofficial repository — 
http://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/comparison.html 


The Official repo is where all the packages for a FreeDOS release come from. 
Some packages do not exist on it for various reasons. 

My repo is far less strict. As long as it can be legally distributed, I’m 
willing to include it. It contains all the packages and versions that are in 
the Official repo plus more versions and packages that are not present. 
Sometimes, packages are pushed here prior to being approved for inclusion on 
the Official repo.

At present, neither RDISK or XMGR exist on the Official Repo. 

https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/rdisk.html 

https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/xmgr.html 


The others are on both repos.

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/himemx.html
 

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/udvd2.html
 

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/uide.html
 


Someday… Programs like FDIMPLES will be capable of fetching packages and 
updates from multiple online 

Re: [Freedos-user] UIDE versus UHDD in freedos 1.2 - and 1.3

[Eric Auer]

Hi Mercury, some short answers :-)

I think dates as version numbers are fine when there is
no explicit version numbering. I would use the date of
the most recent file, leave the decision to you whether
that means the version is this week since YOU yourself
have made per-driver excerpts of the readmes. Otherwise,
use the newest timestamp of the original files, even in
situations where only documentation updates took place.

Regarding sources, please always use source\NAME\FILE.EXT
naming. It is no problem to have separate copies of CC in
source\uide\cc.asm and source\uhdd\cc.asm when installed.

There is an official howto for the directory tree etc. in
ZIP files for install friendly packages, somewhere online.

Having two himemx variants to compare sounds like Japheth
hopes to get MANY TESTERS so a new update can consolidate
into one version again? Or maybe a command line option to
pick one of the two styles now represented by two exes?

I suggest that you give Jerome a signal when you think the
packages on your website have been updated to fix all items
mentioned by him and fully fdinst / fdnpkg compatible :-)

Thank you for your help! Regards, Eric




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Re: [Freedos-user] 4DOS - license issue, not included in FreeDOS 1.3?

[Jon Brase]

On 3/27/20 5:34 PM, Jim Hall wrote:


As I said, I think 4DOS can fix it by removing term 2 from the license 
(and possibly term 3) since that's what makes the 4DOS license "not 
open source." Rex would need to agree to it, since both terms have 
Rex's name on them.


An interesting idea would be to propose that JPSoft crowdfund an 
open-source release of 4NT. They name a price, if there's enough 
interest in the community to raise that money, they release it as open 
source. Once 4NT is open, the FreeDOS-only clause of the 4DOS license is 
no longer necessary. Of course, they might not be interested in such a 
thing, but it would probably go over better than a straight pitch of 
"could you please remove this license term?" with nothing offered.


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Re: [Freedos-user] 4DOS - license issue, not included in FreeDOS 1.3?

[userbeitrag]

Am 27.03.20 um 23:29 schrieb Jim Hall:
> Yes, as I said in my other email, the 4DOS license was a mistake and I
> should not have suggested that extra term to Rex. This is unfortunate.


You might not have got the sources for 4DOS without those additional
terms, since Rex Conn was worried that freeing the sources might make
someone port it to Windows, hence there would be a competitor to
JPSofts' own products.


Long story short: it might have been the right thing to do at the time.


> I am not trying to turn FreeDOS into a "GPLDOS" though. I think that's
> mis-stating the issue. I have always said that FreeDOS should be free (open
> source). There's no point in having a "FreeDOS" if it cannot be used by
> everyone.


Since the 4DOS sources are open and can be freely used by everyone *on
FreeDOS* this statement holds true if you include 4DOS in FreeDOS. After
all, it's a FreeDOS distribution, not a BSD or Linux distribution.
Otherwise systemd would have never made it into Linux, because it cannot
be used on BSD. Free or not.


> In the past, we've included some software that was free
> ("freeware" or "no cost") but not free (open source). And a few distros
> ago, I decided future FreeDOS distributions should not include things that
> weren't "open source." We discussed that on the email lists at the time;
> this was not hidden. I've been moving FreeDOS to be as "open source" as we
> can make it.


Yes, still... 4DOSes' sources are free. Within FreeDOS at least.


> But the problem is that OSI and FSF (GNU) came long after MS-DOS. There
> were a lot of programs written for DOS (and released with source code) that
> didn't use the GNU GPL, or MIT, or BSD, or another OSI-approved or
> FSF-approved license. So we've always known we need to make exceptions for
> some programs that use other licenses.


I was very happy with FreeDOS 1.1. I don't think that everything must be
free as in open source OSI/FSF approved free.


If you want to be Debian, sure, go ahead. But keep in mind that people
use the deb-multimedia repository for exactly that reason: to get the
non-free stuff that Debian excluded. And also keep in mind that Ubuntu
is the way more successful Debian, and it includes all the "bad" stuff
as well...


In other worlds: Why not give the user the choice? I would have made
three repositories: 1-completely free (open source), 2-free, but with
limitations (open source still, maybe some closed-source stuff), and
3-binary only freeware (without the restriction of redistribution,
naturally).


People who install FreeDOS can then choose if they want to be Debian,
Debian-multimedia or Ubuntu. (Kind of...)


A.


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Re: [Freedos-user] 4DOS - license issue, not included in FreeDOS 1.3?

[userbeitrag]

On Mar 27 2020 23:53, Random Liegh wrote via Freedos-user:
> The important question isn't "why would I", the question is "can I".
>
> Any reason someone would want to port software from dos to another OS
> valid. Any reason. But in the case of 4dos they can't because of the
> license.


While that holds true, there are some things that will never be able to
cross between OSes without a substancial change to the licenses. Just
think about ZFS on Solaris and (not on) Linux. Both OSes have an open,
but incompatible license.


The short answer to the question: "no, you cannot". That's just how it
is. But it doesn't mean that the one place where it can be used has to
therefore exclude it.


A.



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Re: [Freedos-user] 4DOS - license issue, not included in FreeDOS 1.3?

[userbeitrag]

On Mar 27 2020 23:34, Jim Hall wrote:
> I didn't want to put FreeDOS in the position of having a "non-free"
> package
> group like some Linux distributions. That's going to make things
> really confusing, and possibly make things harder. As I said, I think
> 4DOS can fix it by removing term 2 from the license (and possibly term
> 3) since that's what makes the 4DOS license "not open source." Rex
> would need to agree to it, since both terms have Rex's name on them.

I'll keep my finger crossed. If you need any support, like people
ligning a petition or writing mails to rc...@jpsoft.com, just tell me.

A.


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