Re: ANNOUNCE FDIinstall preview -> directory structure / tool

Hi, thanks for pointing us to the standard - I did not try to
reinvent it, but as I did not have howto/en/distrib.txt at hand,
I had just documented how my system looked like. Nice to know
that it mostly conforms to the standard :-). The big question
remaining is of course how far we will get in re-structuring those
zip files that do not conform to it.


I propose that the installer can stay simple, a .bat for example,
and that if we run into troubles organizing the currently not-so-
well-maintained ones of the .zip by hand, we should write some
software to help with it. Be it in C, Perl, Bash, ... ;-). Something
similar to my sketch of "installer that can handle mispackaged zip
files" but not being an installer but an "unpack zip AS IS, move
files around half-automatically, pack to a new zip with the old file
date" tool.

By the way, remember to keep quotes short... Just for the records, a
little quote on what we have settled upon so far (because it has been
there even before!):

  BIN\
  BIN\FOO.EXE
  DOC\
  DOC\FOO\
  DOC\FOO\README
  DOC\FOO\COPYING
  HELP\
  HELP\FOO
  NLS\
  NLS\FOO.EN
  NLS\FOO.ES
  NLS\FOO.DE
  SOURCE\FOO\ ...source stuff...
  LIB\FOO\ ...additional files needed by foo.exe...

For far more details not only on package zips, see:
http://fd-doc.sourceforge.net/howto/en/distrib.txt


PS: That webspace for FreeDOS guy is on the list, as far as I know, yes.

PPS: Yes, it would be nice to allow a package name argument that differs
from the basename of the zip - last but not least because:
- a batchfile is unable to split basename and extension
- 8.3 names for the zip often cause "cooltool.exe" to end up in a zip
  with a name like "cto45b2.zip" (cooltool 45 beta 2)...
By the way, neither my DOS nor my Linux "zip" tool have -k, but I will
remember to use 8.3 filenames. My development partition is mounted in
8.3 mode from Linux, so copying files there should sanitize their names :-).

Eric