RE: Documentation

[Robert Krenn <robert.krenn@daltek.se>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eon Man [mailto:eonicman@erols.com]
> Sent: Sunday, July 05, 1998 9:03 PM
> To: MiNT-list
> Subject: Re: Documentation
> 
> Maybe 1.44meg .ST disk images could be made, then compressed 
> with Bzip 2.01. 
> The installer would create a temp directory on the hard drive and the
> installer allows the user to select which files to be loaded 

I've been thinking alot about this, and have some ideas how to 
organize the files in a distribution.

You can do it like it's done in KGMD: All files in one big 
archive wich is then split in smaller (700k) parts. 
This is not very clever, since it's very hard to update 
parts of the distribution.

My suggestion is to make each installed program, or set of 
programs into a package. Then it's very easy to upgrade the 
distribution, just replace that small package with a newer
version. If you don't want the set of packages for 
programming, then you don't even have to download them. 

Each package should come in atleast 2 versions:

	Binary only with neccesary documentation such as 
	manpages and licence agreements.

	Source only with the complete source package 
	for MiNT.

As one example would be the GNU fileutils:

The binary package could be named

gnu_fileutils_1.2.3-BINARY-MINTDIST.tar.gz

and includes the files:

/usr/bin/ls
/usr/bin/cp
/usr/man/man1/ls.1
/usr/man/man1/cp.1
/usr/docs/gnu_fileutils_1.2.3/LICENCE
.....

The source package could be named

gnu_fileutils_1.2.3-SOURCE-MINTDIST.tar.gz

and includes the files:

/usr/src/gnu_fileutils_1.2.3/[the complete source tree]



Also you could specify wich set of packages that is 
required for basic functionality, or even make a 
distribution package with all needed packages in one 
archive.

This is very much like the early Linux package systems, 
the newer Linux distributions are way smarter then this.

Specifying a standardized way of creating this packages 
would make it easy for others to make their own packages 
if they make a program or have ported one.

Maybe we could have a nice package-manager that keep 
track of installed packages, and know which config files 
that need to be changed/edited, and do so automatically.  



About your idea with RAM-disks? I just don't see a need 
for it. If you use TAR + GZIP (as in KGMD) to pack the 
files, you can easily choose what parts of the archive 
you want to extract directly to the filesystem, it even 
works under plain TOS! Not to mention that it supports 
all the nice fetures of a UNIX filesystems with permissions
on files and symbolic links. 

Why go trough all the work of first extracting the files 
to RAM, and then copy it to some filesystem??? 

I can see some problems arising when you have a 4 MB 
machine and trying to install emacs or pine :^D

 

//Robert

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