Hi Mateusz, In FreeDOS 1.0, most packages were in the same directory structure of the same main FreeDOS directory. I do like that approach. Note that it was not extreme in that: For example Arachne, FBC, Emacs, GS, Lynx OpenXP, Pacific C, Pegasus Mail and Setedit all had their own directories, because they are big and have many files. Also for games it was the case that they all had their own subdirectory of a single GAMES directory. For the GAMES, there is no need (imho) to have them reachable in PATH and for thee other mentioned parts, they sometimes had batch files in the common freedos BIN directory to start them, which is also a nice idea.
For the general packaging, I like this structure, all in subdirectories of the common freedos directory: - appinfo (one file per package in there: I do NOT like having a packages directory with many one-file subdirs) - bin (one or few files per package, in PATH, and maybe drivers, not in path, to keep device drivers separate) - doc (one directory per package, yet very few files, maybe could be NAME.txt w/o dir when onle one file?) - help (one file per package per language, fixed naming scheme, HTMLHELP in a subdirectory or separate place) - nls (one file per package per language, if available, often no file for English when that is a fallback in the binary, although good for translations to have it) - source (one directory per package, only installed for those packages where I want to use sources, not all!) - temp (could also be outside the freedos install tree) Note that CPI / CPX and translations of ctmouse and the fortune cookie file (etc.) have their own directories, so for example BIN does not get clobbered by them. If many apps had extra files, one could also consider a tree with VAR name-of-package subdirectories, or SHARE name-of-package, but it feels too un-DOS to do it often. Note that this is just about FreeDOS and things which are part of the distro. I keep my own files in many other dir trees, e.g. one for arkade games, one for board games, or one per programming language, with sources, compilers and compiled projects as subdirectory trees. Other examples are a directory for batch files, another non-FreeDOS BIN directory, paint software, info software, audio things... Even on a separate drive are self-made sources, collected demos, books, texts, pictures, audio, Windows things... So far for answering > 'how people store their stuff on FreeDOS'. for my case :-) > 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). To me it is okay that games end up in dosdir / games, simply being packaged like that. I can still move them by hand later, of course. > 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% It could do that, but that is not necessary either. On the distro (and on the web) you can just keep the ZIP packages for each of the categories in separate directories, while they can still unzip into the same places. For example I would NOT want apps with few files to unzip into separate diretories, I would just want their binaries in BIN already many other FreeDOS binaries are :-) There is no need to split them, they all come from one distro and will all be free and (all?) open source :-) > 2b. To avoid troubles in future, we could say that everything that > starts with 'dosdir/' is redirected to %DOSDIR%, and anything else will > be caught by the packager that will tell the user it got an unknown > kind of package. This however will break FreeDOS 1.0 packages. I would not do that. If you really are worried about splitting packages, a very simple answer is to give the user for EACH of them the chance to manually select another directory to install to. This is what the user can do by manually unzipping anyway. The installer could do for example the following: For each of the CATEGORIES (as per directory where the zips are, NO MATTER what is inside the zips directory structure wise) the user gets asked if they should be installed into 1. the dosdir or 2. one directory chosen by the user or whether 3. the user should get asked for EACH package in which directory it should be. This will make it easy to install BASE in dosdir, GAMES in games and pack one directory for each package for, say, COMPILERS... > Maybe there are other neat solutions that I am unaware of. Tell me. Maybe I could give some inspiration :-) > 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...?) I like storing things from the FreeDOS distro in one place, although having a games SUBdirectory there is useful, while storing all OTHER stuff separately, which is probably what many other users do, too. Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How fast is your code? 3 out of 4 devs don\\\'t know how their code performs in production. Find out how slow your code is with AppDynamics Lite. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;262219672;13503038;z? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
