> On Oct 18, 2015, at 7:29 AM, Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Jerome,
>
>>> That is a preview or technology demo, not a release.
>
> Not joking... In the past, we had release candidates. This
> had the advantage that people were AWARE that by trying a
> RC, they made themselves a guinea pig of some experiment.
I know. But, I was joking about just forcing it out the door by
Halloween. Hence, the Super Scary Release. So, your comment
about it being a "Tech Preview” just struck me funny. Because,
using a TP as an actual Release is “Very Scary.” :)
>
> There are not so many users who want to install FreeDOS and
> you certainly do not want to piss them off by declaring any
> experimental release as stable release and damaging stuff.
>
>>> Actually I have written a small (4 kB) tool for that in 2003
>
> The binary is 3.7 kB, the zip is 16 kB including C source
> code and a little bit of documentation... Note that KITTEN
> and similar lightweight i18n / localization libraries also
> might be a nice idea for Mike to localize his TCP stuff :-)
>
> Also note that you are busy making a whole CD with FreeDOS
> stuff and that your current plan is to have a button which
> would install ALL source codes while even in Linux you only
> have buttons to install individual source packages for the
> few things that you want to recompile at any given moment.
>
> In short, do not worry about 16 kB if 1.6 GB are fine anyway.
Sorry, I was in a very ornery mood. The 16kb size was just a joke.
Although, reloading it and the translation files for every text string
displayed, I do have some concerns on the performance. (more below)
>
>> vlocal default.en vecho "@WELCOME_MSG %OS_NAME% %OS_VERSION%"
>
> In the "classic" style of localized FreeDOS tools, you would
> not pass the name of a translated string text file as option.
>
> Instead, you would pass a PATH and a LANGUAGE as environment
> variables, which is more efficient. The software will look
> at PATH\NAMEOFTOOL.LANGUAGE and if that file is not found,
> it will fall back to compiled-in English strings. Localize,
> being a generic echo tool, has no compiled-in strings, so
> only there, you pass an English default on the command line.
>
With the overall command line length limits in a batch file, passing really long
file names and paths should be avoided. I may use an env var instead of
passing the translation filename on the command line.
>> type default.en | vstr /l 1 | vecho /i " %OS_NAME% %OS_VERSION%"
>
> You can reduce the number of steps:
>
> vstr /l 1 < %V8NLS%\default.%LANG% | vecho /i " %OS_NAME %OS_VERSION”
Unfortunately, pre-stage 6 prompts and text, no I/O redirection is
possible and neither will work. That’s why I will probably go with the
simple translations using:
vlocal vecho @SOMETHING
No pipes required.
Without vecho, multi-color text highlighting won’t be viable.
>
> However, I recommend to build vstr into vecho, because during
> install, you want to reduce pipe usage as far as possible :-)
I did think of doing the localization translations inside vecho.
But, the increase in size to the executable would probably
negate the benefits of having it internalized to vecho.
Also, vstr is for doing all kind of stuff to text. Most of which
has not yet been implemented. I’ve only been adding to it as I
need specify things from it. The plan for vstr is more or less
a stripped down versions of grep + cut + tr + some other stuff.
For example, at present it will return a total line count, return
a specific line from a text file, translate a numeric value into
an ascii character, output a character N times.
Future plans include things like:
returning parts of lines based on delimiters.
case changing.
string searching.
character stripping and conversion.
line prefixing and postfixing.
other stuff.
The performance of the current batch installer seems sufficient.
Most of the slower stuff is a result of disk I/O from making a
backup copy of the previous OS and unzipping the new packages.
Although, it was a real dog before I made some modifications to
the boot disk.
>
> Note that classic FreeDOS style uses %NLSPATH% for directories
> (semicolon separated) which can contain localization text files,
> but I would not know how to parse that list in a batch context.
>
> Yet another reason why sometimes C is more convenient than BAT.
>
> Cheers, Eric
>
>
>
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