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Support distro name change from EasyOS in woofQ

March 04, 2023 — BarryK

I posted to the forum about changing the name of "EasyOS" and "Easy" to something else, such as "WaryOS" and "Wary":

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=83290#p83290

There is fundamental problem with implementing that though, as the text "EasyOS" and "Easy" is hard-coded in woofQ, right from creation of EasyOS in early 2017.

I thought about replacing all occurrences of those text strings with variables, and wherever there is $(gettext " ... EasyOS ...") replace with something like $(eval_gettext " ... \${NEWDISTRONAME} ...")
However, that is very complicated to implement, a huge amount of work and likelihood of something going wrong.

Anyway, started reading up on eval_gettext, including on the old Puppy Forum, such as here:

https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=96326

...that thread has a broken link to my blog, and I searched my blog to find it, found this:

https://bkhome.org/news/202005/simplified-translation-for-easypup.html

...yes, I already implemented a name change from "EasyOS" to "EasyPup", in script woofq/puppy/7build-puppy-cd -- needed the memory jog! I have adapted that code, see changes to script '3buildeasydistro':

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/e6745de60616739e4129bd8346cee94066b184fa

/etc/DISTRO_SPECS has variable DISTRO_NAME, same as all the pups. I am now deprecating that variable, replaced with three new ones:

#One or more words that identify this distribution:
DISTRO_NAME='EasyOS Kirkstone64'
#20230304 ...keep for compatibility existing scripts, add these...
DISTRO_NAME_LONG='EasyOS Kirkstone64'
DISTRO_NAME_NORMAL='EasyOS'
DISTRO_NAME_SHORT='Easy'

A fix was also required in the initrd:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/860e5d1f7470b07874dfb0488be8900fa5fd11ae

At this stage, won't change the name of the 'easy-<version>-<arch>.img' file, nor 'easy.sfs', as that will cause some problems maybe.

A good outcome of this is that anyone can use woofQ to create their own derivative of EasyOS, with their own custom name.

EDIT 2023-03-05:
I decided that it is feasible to also change 'easy.sfs' to '${DISTRO_NAME_SHORT,,}.sfs', see commit:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/45ca57c0c9dc9c57989a1553b703f0ec8f8e491d

The only hiccup that I can see is some images showing easy.sfs, as well as online docs. Don't yet know about changing 'easy-*.img' file. 

EDIT 2023-03-05:
Support replace 'easy-*.img' with '${DISTRO_NAME_SHORT,,}-*.img':

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/8b553bd037032d01c1f619f1fc1926b1b48c5af7    

Tags: easy