Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 14:17:29 EST-10EDT,10,-1,0,7200,3,-1,0,7200,3600 Subject: [UnixOS2_Archive] No. 260 ************************************************** Wednesday 03 December 2003 Number 260 ************************************************** Subjects for today 1 Re: UnixOS/2 distro : Andreas Buening **= Email 1 ==========================** Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 23:56:02 +0100 From: Andreas Buening Subject: Re: UnixOS/2 distro Michael Zolk wrote: > > On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 05:53:29PM +0100, Andreas Buening wrote: > > > 3. Installation tools > > > > A big issue are the installation and administration tools. We > > already have some but they are still incomplete. Micheal, if > > you're reading, could you provide some information about, which > > tool does what, [...] > > The package on unixos2.com contains a few man pages where I tried to do > just that. They probably need more work, since this is my first try. The last version is ux2_base-02sep03.zip? Some things I don't know: What is mod.cmd and modify.cmd? What's their syntax and what exactly do they do? > I tried to convert them to HTML using "groff -Thtml", however the result is > less than convincing :| I think the file format is less important. ;-) What I think is important: A readable documentation of how these tools are used and what they basically do (aka a manpage) and a documentation of how the installation process works which means some kind of specification. In this way other people could rely on this and some general behaviour can't change between different releases. The specification shouldn't be a novel, just a basic outline. ;-) There's also a lot of error handling necessary. E.g., installpkg.cmd doesn't check whether rexxutil and ux2util were found. > > For the final implementation, I guess, we need some database which > > contains all the package info, so that it is not necessary to > > browse hundreds of single PKGINFO files when installing another > > package. The access to this database can be written in rexx > > (from scratch) or we could use other (simple) tools like perl, > > python, whatever. > > Is there a Rexx DLL for database access? No idea, but I think we won't need a real database. Since it might be too time consuming to read in hundreds of pkginfo files every time e.g., some package dependencies have to be checked. Therefore, a file that contains all package dependencies could be suitable. Also a file that contains name and origin of all files and directories that have been installed might be useful. Reading these files should be easy because REXX is powerful in string parsing but we need also functions to add, change, and remove entries in these files. Searching entries in large data tables can be slow, so some qsort(), bsearch() might be necessary, and so on. What I'd really like to do is to make the installation tools bulletproof and fully usable during december, or at last january. If you have time, I'd like to discuss some details of the installation process and related stuff. Bye, Andreas