Method to update !Boot

With the discussion that has gone on over the last few days, and with my own replacement of a boot sequence still in my recent memory, it occurs to me that we should consider whether it is possible to automate the process of updating a user’s !Boot directory – or at least give substantial help.

It’s unfortunate that the boot directory contains a mixture of the user’s settings, extra resources that the user’s software needs, and a rather complex set of Obey files etc. that get RISC OS up and running.

I would like to see boot split up to separate out user specific stuff. (It would be nice if that part could be easily used on a pen drive.)

I would also like to see the official supplied !Boot to be separated from upgraded system resources. (You would have a start option for original boot only.)

The official part of !Boot could then be managed by a future version of packman controlled by ROOL.

The contents of the other part would be managed as at present, (hopefully migrating more and more to the manager.)

I would also like these !Boots to work fully read only. (Obviously the packager and the user would have rights to override this)

(This would also give a future possibility of using read-only archives which would allow non ADFS filesystems to be used simply. The manager would have the additional software required to modify archives.)

PackMan should be capable of managing the ROOL-provided parts of !Boot. It just needs creation of packages for each component (of which there are many) so that individual upgrades can be handled. That means it needs plugging into the ROOL build process to add the necessary metadata files to the zips, and structure them in the appropriate way.

A cursory look suggests it’s feasible, but I don’t know the intricacies of the build process (particularly the ROOL autobuilder stuff, which would come in handy).

I haven’t tried, but I suspect it wouldn’t take much to make a disc-based updater (ie a CD bearing PackMan and a collection of packages to update an existing system offline).