SCOGEN(1) SCO System V SCOGEN(1)NAMEscogen-- generate custom(ADM) format diskettes
SYNOPSISscogen [ -. ] [ -n ] package-name
scovol package-name vol
scopaksiz package-name
scotar [ -n ]
OPTIONS
The -n option to scogen is passed through to scotar, which tells it not
to attempt to perform compression.
The -. option to scogen tells it to consider the current working direc-
tory to be the root from which to find the packages. Normally, scogen
will cd to / first.
DESCRIPTIONscogen is a simplistic alternative to SCO's PETKIT package for generat-
ing floppy disc sets in the installation format used by custom(ADM) as
used by SCO and partially defined in Intel's iBCS-2 document.
The emphasis is different from PETKIT's in that scogen is more strongly
directed at producing distributions from your working versions, rather
than from huge engineered trees of highly controlled stuff that large
companies tend to use.
The main reason I wrote scogen was to enable me to make compressed dis-
tributions without having to have a separate copy of the entire distri-
bution; the scotar utility is a partial replacement for tar(C) that com-
presses the files on the fly as it creates the tar image. The com-
pressed format is the one devised by SCO and is not documented anywhere,
not even here. Read the code in scotar if you're interested. Suffice
to say that the tar image is not compressed overall -- unlike the GNU
format. Instead, each individual file within the tar image is sepa-
rately compressed, which has the major advantages that a standard tar
can be used to extract them, and it is possible to do a table of con-
tents of the thing without having to decompress it first.
USAGE
Ensure that you have a valid /etc/perms/foo for your package named foo
and then simply use the command line
scogen foo
which will generate floppy disc images for the volumes foo.01 and so on
in /tmp. The scripts scopaksiz, scovol, and scotar are really subrou-
tines of scogen. scovol generates a list of files using fixperm -fw and
postprocesses them slightly, adding the volume label at the beginning.
scopaksiz just updates the disc usage of each package in the perms file.
You don't actually have to create the ./tmp/_lbl/whatever volume file on
your hard disc because scotar knows they are special, and generates the
tar record for them without looking at your filesystem at all. Also,
scotar will modify the tar header for ./etc/perms/package to become
./tmp/perms so that custom(ADM) will be able to find it. Other than
that, all that scotar does is to read a list of files on standard input
and write a tar image of compressed files on standard output. Note that
only files that are not already compressed will be treated specially and
marked for automatic decompression upon extraction.
Unlike PETKIT I do not automatically allocate files to disc volumes--I
prefer to do it by hand. I guess you might be able to use the PETKIT
program to do it for you, but don't ask me how because I don't know.
PREREQUISITESscogen requires the perl utility, version 4.0 or higher, to be installed
as /usr/bin/perl.
compress must also be installed in /usr/bin--this is the default under
SCO XENIX 2.3.x anyhow.
FILES
/etc/perms/package
/tmp/package.nn (output tar images)
/tmp/package.nn.log (log files)
AUTHOR
Ronald Khoo <ronald@ibmpcug.co.uk>
BUGS
This a bit of a cheap hack, with little or no error tolerance, but I
find it quite a timesaver. I guess the lack of a tool to help generate
the /etc/perms/package file is a bug, though I prefer to generate them
by hand, so I don't really miss one.
RESTRICTIONS
Under SCO XENIX, automatic decompression is only available on versions
2.3.3 with update UFN and higher. If you use scogen to produce distri-
butions for earlier systems, you must put a copy of uncompress in /tmp
and arrange for your ./tmp/init.package script to uncompress the distri-
bution files. See the files sample.perms and sample.init in the scogen
distribution for an example of how to do this.
If you have a binary distribution, these files are actually the
./tmp/perms/fsoft and ./tmp/init.fsoft files on the first and last dis-
tribution floppy discs, respectively. Note that custom(ADM) actually
requires the perms file to be on the first disc and the init file to be
on the last. That's why they are where they are.
VERSION
@(#) $Id: scogen.1,v 1.4 1991/12/06 16:13:47 ronald Exp $
Local Hacks 2
