Re: [Freedos-user] fdupdate

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

Hello,

I do agree with Rugxulo. Just adding my 2cts regarding FDUpdate (I'm the one responsible for creating the monster).

> Since I too often don't have networking in native DOS, I've never
> relied on FDupdate. Presumably it can (or could) do so, but I don't
> know the specifics. I don't know if it updates your install or
> (presumably) only the .ZIP files themselves.

The idea of FDUpdate was to provide some kind of semi-graphical manager that would allow the average joe to add/update whatever packages in its system.
To do so, FDUpdate downloads a list of available pakages from the FreeDOS repository (the URL of the repository is configurable via a configuration file), then it presents the list in a pseudo graphical menu with some descriptions about every package, and let the user to choose packages to install.
FDUpdate is, however, just a nifty frontend. In the background it calls wget or htget (the downloader backend is configurable) to download the *.zip files into a temp directory, and then it calls FDPKG to install these zip files.
All this would be great, but - as Rugxulo already noted - there is far too few packages online to make FDUPDATE actually useable in real life. There are also some minor (mostly cosmetic) bugs here and there, which I didn't ever cared to fix, as I quite quickly lost hope, as the whole packaging work was way more than what I could ever handle on my free time... and without packages, a packager is, well, useless.

> Yes, you pretty much have to install or update things manually. I hate
> to say it, but FDupdate seems like a failed experiment.

Indeed. 'Failed experiment' is a term that describes FDUpdate quite accurately. Altough I prefer to think about it as a 'proof of concept' work ;)

In other words - don't put any hope into using FDUPDATE for any serious update of your FreeDOS system. FDUPDATE will probably never be useable - unless suddenly there is an army of volunteers that starts massively populating the FDUPDATE repository (which is highly unlikely to ever happen anyway).

Ciao,
Mateusz