Re: [Freedos-user] Freedos 1.1...

[Mateusz V. <ma...@vi...>]

Hi Michael!

On Wednesday 29 July 2009 05:29 (CEST), Michael Robinson wrote:
> Anyone know where Freedos 1.1 stands at this point?  

AFAIK, v1.1 is still in "stagnation" mode....

> I'd like to see 
> it get released.  

Yup, I hear you loud and clear.
However, to release FreeDOS 1.1 there are few things to achieve:
- Packaging all the stuff which is available today, and not-yet-packaged
- Preparing a consistent update software. Currently, I am holding the release of the latest fdupdate tool, because this one has been written to support "full packages" (ie. packages which contains both sources+binaries), but FDPKG does not, so there's no point to release fdupdate as the package backend (FDPKG) is not (yet?) compatible... Of course, I could hack fdupdate and make it saw each downloaded package into separate binary and source, and then feed FDPKG which such "binary-only" and/or "source-only" package, but it is just too much work for such workaround...

> I would also like to see a focus on supporting 
> people who want to set up their own local update servers. 

Well... That's not really up to the project, but rather to these people who would like to use such local servers...

> The fdupdate program
> seems to have an option to point it at a different URL, but I don't
> see instructions on how to set up your own update server.

Because there is no such instruction.
I don't thought that anyone would ask ever, so.... :-)
The "instruction" is, in fact, very simple:
You have to download the file "fdupdate.tab" from, say, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/fdupdate/fdupdate.tab , and then download every package which is mentionned in this file (fdupdate.tab is just a tab-delimited file). Then, put all these files (packages+fdupdate.tab) on a flat directory on your http server, and write the new URL to the FDUPDATE local configuration file.
That's all!
Note, that FDUPDATE is not following official (Jim's) recomendations about update server's structure. Jim posted a while ago a technote about "how a FDUPDATE server should look like", but this has never been implemented so far... (of course, you're welcome to write your own update tool, which would follow this technote) ;-)

Best regards,
Mateusz
-- 
You'll find my public OpenPGP key at http://www.viste-family.net/mateusz/pub_key