re: ANNOUNCE FDIinstall preview -> further ideas

Hi, first of all, thank you for working on FDInstall.

I have noticed that most of our ZIP do not follow any useful rules for
directory structure, I suggest the following restructuring, which can
be either applied to the ZIP files or become part of the installer.

- leading paths called like the program get replaced by the freedos-
  install directory, for example c:\fdos.
- all executables end up in $INSTALLDIR\bin.
- all files in a "help" directory end up in $INSTALLDIR\help\$ZIPNAME,
  further subdirectories of "help" in the ZIP being flattened out.
- all files in a "nls" directory end up in $INSTALLDIR\nls - no furher
  work needed.
- all other files end up in either $INSTALLDIR\help\$ZIPNAME or in
  $INSTALLDIR\src\$ZIPNAME based on user decisions or some heuristics.

This is very kludgy, so probably it would be better to push some
"FreeDOS directory naming standard" again, I would say. A ZIP file
in "recommended" layout would have contents like this:

File "foo.zip":
\bin\foo.com
\doc\foo\readme.txt
\doc\foo\changes.txt
...
\help\foo
\nls\foo.en
\nls\foo.es
...
\src\foo\foo.h
\src\foo\foo.c
\src\foo\makefile
\src\foo\compile.txt
...
^- the leading \ are of course optional. The idea is to install the whole
hierarchy under $INSTALLDIR, which can be for example c:\fdos\ ...

I wonder if it would be possible and make sense to have this kind of directory
structure at least for most of the standard packages.

A quick and dirty implementation for the -installer- would be to first
unzip to a temporary directory, then copy any executables anywhere in there
to $INSTALLDIR\bin, and then let the user decide for every other file whether
it should end up in help, doc\$ZIPNAME, nls, or src\$ZIPNAME. The installer
would then log where it has copied the stuff in the same format as zipinfo -1
would have done, thus it would have virtually reorganized the ZIP file while
installing it. To save time, it would be cool if you could answer the help /
nls / doc / src question once for whole directories (possibly including sub-
directories). For this, the user should be given a "unzip -Z -1 | list" (or
more, not list) before all the question-asking starts.

I think that all this is probably lots of unnecessary work to implement,
but I am not sure if it is feasible to have most of our ZIP files organized
in a way that they contain some sane directory structure already.

Feel free to share your opinions about this everybody. At least I
am prepared to structure my ZIP file contents a bit more nicely to
ease the installation with FDINSTALL.

Now some feedback on the current FDINSTALL implementation:
When in doubt, use IF to ensure the existence of the PREFIX and LOGDIR
directories and the PACKAGE itself...
Hm. A prefix allways causes simulate? Or do I misread here?
You do not use %UNZIP% so you need not un-set it :-).
Now about uninstal.bat:
Hm. Shouldnt you popd before you RM ...@...? And if rm gives an
errorlevel, you should probably avoid deleting the logfiles if rm
signals failure.

Thanks for your efforts so far, I am curious to see the next version.

Eric