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Mail Archives: djgpp/2000/01/04/08:19:46

Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 11:18:47 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel <kalum AT newmail DOT net>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Is DJGPP really suitable for beginners?
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On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel wrote:

> Actually Eli, Wouldn't it be better if some kind of a small Setup 
> program written specifically for DJGPP which could be downloaded 
> seperately in addition to the normal Zips was written and 
> recommended by the zip-picker.

This issue has come up before, more than once; you may wish to search
the DJGPP mail archives for related discussions.

Writing an installer for DJGPP is a very complex and non-trivial task.
DJGPP supports several different target platforms (DOS, Windows 3.X,
Windows 9X, NT, DOSEmu, etc.), each one with its own way of setting
the system configuration; the installer must know all those ways, and
it must NOT mess a working system when it installs DJGPP (think about
complications with multi-config AUTOEXEC.BAT).  Some of these
environments lack built-in DPMI services, so the installer needs to
cope with that (or be compiled with a 16-bit compiler).

The above is only a tip of the iceberg; you may find the rest in the
archives.  The result is that this task was tried two or three times
(the last effort is still ongoing, see v2/install.exe and
v2/lbint02s.zip on SimTel.NET), but until now didn't take off.  Even 
evolutionary half-steps, like the zip-picker and unzip32.exe take a
long time to take their effect.  Perhaps we should expect that in the
age when reading instructions is not in fashion anymore...

> IMHO this will solve quite a lot of problems due to missing zips, 
> badly behaved unzip programs, LFN,and a wole lot of errors. And it 
> will be quite helpful to the newbies as well.

To be helpful, the installer needs to be actively maintained, and
modified from time to time to track changes in the various DJGPP
packages as they evolve.  This is an additional hard-to-get
requirement which could make or break the entire project.

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