STRIKE!greengeek wrote:I'm going to go out on a limb here and attempt a description:starhawk wrote:Although I do not understand exactly what TOPLESS is/does, yet
TOPLESS allows the user to take a standard puppy.sfs as released from the developer and personalise it without changing the original puppy.sfs at all
This avoids the "remaster" situation where you would end up with a number of different modified puppy.sfs files all with the same name.
How does it do this? By having a .cfg file which the user fills with a list of their desired personalisations. And by having a number of .sfs files containing the software the user wants to be grafted in to the pup during boot.
Whats the point? - well lets say you love Tahrpup but like to use it for a number of quite different tasks. You could develop a single personalised Tahrpup with everything installed in it to create a bloated install.
Alternatively, you might want to have 6 different slim versions of Tahrpup (maybe for use by different people on different machines) without doing 6 remasters.
Why create 6 different Tahrpups?
1) A version for indepth graphics creation and manipulation
2) A version for high powered audio applications
3) A version for CAD file creation and scientifc/mathematical modelling
4) A version in a foreign language for your auntie in southeast Monrovia
5) A version with pink lovehearts and lavender floral wallpaper (yuk) for your niece.
6) A wordprocessing version designed to run on a low powered PC.
If I understand it correctly, all of these versions use the same main puppy.sfs - they all get personalised during the boot process by way of the config file and the pile of available sfses you've chosen.
I guess this means you could have one frugal install that can be personalised many different ways - just by virtue of the cfg file. A personal puppy for everyone in the family.
In theory this probably means that if a puppy developer released an updated main puppy.sfs (lets say containing a security fix for wget) it becomes easy to incorporate that without going through a whole series of remasters.
Also - this method allows you to run without savefile - so that your puppy is fully personalised but after each boot it comes up in a pristine state without any accidental junk that you loaded by mistake during the last session. No malware incorporated into a savefile. So you get the benfits of personalisation and also the benefits of pristine non-persistence.
(Just save any personal data on an external partition - that's what every user should be doing already anyway...)
Jeez I hope I'm fairly representing TOPLESS here - don't want to be misinforming )
(not exactly up to 100% but up to 99.5% )