On Mar 25, 2025, at 6:17 PM, Stu via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
Animator is open source - I think I just started by grabbing some other package - so I should sort that, it's BSD
I guess there would ideally be an ANIMATOR_SRC package to go along with the binaries packages ?
Generally, we put both Binaries and Sources in the same package. It keeps all that stuff together. The package manager will install or exclude installing the sources based on its configuration. This is set when FreeDOS is installed. But, it can be changed later by editing the configuration file. Or, simple by using unzip to get the sources.
I wasn't aware of the remapping, and that's probably because I haven't installed FDIMPLES in DOSEMU2 yet, (which is my DOS environment of choice), there's a script to install the freedos userland, (the DOS there is usually FDPP, a fork of freedos), I'll add that and then I can actually try installing some packages.
FDIMPLES is a user interface to simplify browsing and add/removing packages. It relies upon FDINST (part of FDNPKG) to perform the installation and removal of the packages. The remapping is performed by that program.
FDNPKG includes two command line versions. FDNPKG.EXE that requires a 386+ and can pull files from an online repository. FDINST.EXE which is 8086 compatible and can only install packages from local media.
For a number of reasons, FDIMPLES is likely to move away from using FDNPKG to perform package installation.
I think the default binary for Animator is V.EXE, is it normal that I'd add batch files with longer names ?
Couldn’t hurt and can prevent confusion. You could place a ANIMATOR.BAT in the LINKS directory. That would make it easy to run from any directory by simple typing “animator”.
However, it must be a very simple batch file. During installation by FDNPKG, that batch will be converted to a COM binary file which can be problematic for some programs.
If it is an issue or you want to use a more complicated batch to launch the program, place the batch file under a BATLINKS path. Likely \BATLINKS\ANIMATOR.BAT.
Batch files in that path are remapped to the same directory as those under LINKS. However, they are installed as-is and are not converted to binary executables. I'm on quite a slow timeframe, with lots of projects I do little bits on - hence trying to automate some of this stuff, otherwise it's hard to remember what was up when I last tried something months ago, which is where wanting to make the dev environment reproducible comes in, regarding that - I noticed that openwatcom is packaged for freedos, so I should try that once I get fdimples installed.
There are a number of development languages available on the BonusCD for FreeDOS 1.4[*]. Generally, OpenWatcom C and NASM are the preferred ones for FreeDOS by the community.
[*] FreeDOS 1.4 has not been released. It is coming very soon. On 4/1, the 1.4 Gold Master will be released to the developer community for final testing. If all is well with the GM, the OS could be released on April 5th. So, less than two weeks away from the highly likely release of 1.4.
Oh, nice - I see you have heartland and other games - I really should get fdimples into DOSEMU2 and try installing these.
The stuff under /redist/ are not part of the Download and Update Repository and cannot be installed a package manager. They are either simple archive files or have their own installer.
At present, FDIMPLES is not network aware and only installs things from local media. Plans are to eventually have it support multiple online repositories and many other improvements. But, other items related to FreeDOS have been a much higher priority. Hopefully, someday work on the next version of it will continue.
:-)
Jerome
There are two things I want to do -
One is to create a package for Animator (which used to be known as Autodesk Animator or AnimatorPro)
I have a script I started here
At the moment this packages existing binaries, but I wouldn't submit this for inclusion until I can actually build Animator, and work out what else needs to be included, some sanity checking would be great.
I'm also interested in writing a script to make a package for TurboC++ 3.0 - this couldn't be included, but I have a license for it, so would like it to be reproducibly installed for a dev environment, in that case I'd make the script that generates the packages available.
TurboC++ would want some environment variables setup + the PATH.
For the Borland tools that were released, I'd need to check if I could package them, or if I'd need to do the same approach of download - then have a script to package them.
I took a look at the the project. For the most part, everything looks good.
The LSM looks fine and the directory structure for the ZIP looks correct.
I’m sure you are away that several paths in the ZIP archive get remapped during installation. For example, the \PROGS\ANMATOR will be mapped to C:\ANIMATOR when installed by the package manager. To see a complete listing of the mappings that occur, check out the C:\FreeDOS\bin\fdnpkg.cfg file.
I saw the LSM copying-policy shows copyright and not an open source license. It the project open source, freeware, commercial , etc?
Unfortunately, it would need to be open source for consideration to included with a FreeDOS release, GitLab Archive or the Official Software Download/Update Repository.
However, my Unofficial FreeDOS Download/Update Repository has all of the same packages as the Official repository. Plus, it is less restrictive and has more packages. As long as the license permits it can be legally redistributed in package form, it could potentially be included there. My server also has a few programs which are not open source that permit redistribution, but forbid modifications. For those, they are simple provided outside the repository under
The repository management software (used on both sites) does have an additional requirement which would need satisfied by your package. Even when there are no sources or if sources are included elsewhere in the package, there must be a directory for sources and at least one file present. In your case, a file SOURCE\ANIMATOR\README.TXT would satisfy the repository management software.
That is a requirement of the repositories. It does not effect the package manager that installs/removes packages.
:-)
Jerome
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