I'd say we really do need a set standard for versioning. The frustration Eric
mentioned in his email has hit me once or twice as well when combing through
archives to compare versions.
The format I propose is:
- The date in ISO 8601 format
- Two digits for the major version
- Two digits for the major version
- Two digits for the revision
- A character for the packaging identifier (this would be changed in cases
where the packaging of the application has changed but the application itself
has not)
- A character for the type of archive (Perhaps something like: a = All, b =
Binary only, s = Source only)
- Hyphens between all fields for clarity
For the hypothetical application GeeWhiz, this would give us the following
structure:
Note that there is no program name at all in the individual archives - the
parent folder has that instead. Programs which simply use the date as their
version number would leave the version field as "000000". Also, in my opinion,
the package type (A, B, or S character ) could be omitted since every archive
should have all components - all source code, all binaries, all documentation,
etc. It should be up to the installer/archiver to only extract what the user
requests from the archive.
The only drawback (if you can call it that) with this specification is that the
resulting filenames are most definitely not 8.3 compliant. My fix for that -
that is, if we even care about this issue - would be to have one ZIP for each
application, then have all versions of that program in that single ZIP. I know,
I know, that doesn't make it easy to download a single version, but is that
really an issue since the majority of our applications are so tiny to begin
with? Also, doing so would allow archivers to achieve a much higher compression
ratio, and ultimately saving space in the end.
This concludes my feedback on the issue :) I'm interested to hear everyone
else's thoughts on this as well.
Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Saturday, May 1, 2021 11:53 AM, Robert Riebisch [email protected] wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
>> Just wanted to let you know that I did a little cleanup on the FreeDOS
>> files archive at Ibiblio.
>
> Okay.
>
>> Over the history of using the files archive on Ibiblio, I haven't really
>> done a great job at keeping things clean. For example, there was one
>> directory for FreeDOS Choice at /files/dos/choice
>> https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/choice/ and
>> /all/ of the releases for FreeDOS Choice lived there, just dumped in one
>> directory listing:
>>
>> choice201.zip
>> choice20.zip
>> choice30.zip
>> choice31.zip
>> choice33.zip
>> choice35a.zip
>> choice35b.zip
>> choice35.zip
>> choice36a.zip
>> choice36b.zip
>> choice36c.zip
>> choice36d.zip
>> choice36e.zip
>> choice36.zip
>> choice37.zip
>> choice38a.zip
>> choice38b.zip
>> choice38.zip
>> choice41.zip
>> choice42a.zip
>> choice42b.zip
>> choice43a.zip
>> choice43.zip
>> choice44s.zip
>> choice44x.zip
>>
>> If you wanted to get the latest version of FreeDOS Choice, what file
>> would you download? Would you grab the first one on the list
>> (choice201.zip) or the last file in the list (choice44x.zip)? If you
>> know the history of FreeDOS Choice, you would know that choice201.zip is
>> version 2.01, and choice44x.zip is version 4.4.
>
> I would have hoped to find "files" named latests.zip and latestx.zip (or
> something like that), which always link to the latest version.
>
>> 4.2:
>> alt_TE/ choice42a.zip choice42b.zip
>> 4.3:
>> alt_TE/ choice43a.zip choice43.zip
>
> What is "alt_TE"?
>
>> I haven't finished going through /all/ the directories on Ibiblio yet ..
>> that will take months. But wanted to let folks know I was doing it.
>
> "Even the longest journey..." You know it. ;-)
> Cheers,
> Robert
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> +++ BTTR Software +++
> Home page: https://www.bttr-software.de/
>
> DOS ain't dead: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/
> Freedos-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
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