The GENDIST Toolkit


Migrating from previous GENDIST versions

If you want to migrate your GENDIST generated build-system for your distribution to a new GENDIST version, you have two choices. The conservative way is to keep all modified files: new files are generated with the extension ".new". If your brave or if you did not modify any files, you can also overwrite the old files directly, in this case the old files are saved with the extension ".old"

Note that GENDIST only operates on files of the build-system, not any files meant to be changed by the user (e.g. README or input-files for syslinux). If you really have the need to modify the files of the build-system, I would prefer to hear from you and check if there is a need to modify GENDIST.

As an example, assume you generated your distribution with the following command:

# bin/gendist.sh -n FooLinux -t lilo -p /usr/local/src

The build-system is generated in /usr/local/src/FooLinux. Now, if you upgrade to a new version of gendist, you could just repeat the above command:

# bin/gendist.sh -n FooLinux -t lilo -p /usr/local/src
to create the new files, again in the directory /usr/local/src/FooLinux.

In this case, you should check all ".new"-files and compare them to the previous versions. You should generally replace the files of the build-system (e.g. Makefiles, rules).

In contrast, if you run

# bin/gendist.sh -n FooLinux -t lilo -p /usr/local/src -o
the new files will overwrite existing files. In this case, you have to check the ".old"-files and compare them with the new versions. WARNING: if you run gendist.sh with the -o switch twice, you will loose your old versions!

In a previous version of GENDIST, I had the stupid idea to generate the GENDIST version number into the files. This will result in excessive differences between files. This has been fixed starting from 1.0.0.


Migrating from version 1.0.1 to 1.2.0

In addition to the migration issues discussed above, there were some internal changes in GENDIST between 1.0.1 and 1.2.0 to facilitate future extensions. This triggered changes in variable names and directory layout:

To migrate your distribution, you have to


My Homepage
Bernhard Bablok (mail @ bablokb.de)