Subversion Repositories SvarDOS

%hSvarDOS origins (history from the point of view of its creator)

Mateusz Viste, the SvarDOS author, says:

In the years 2005-2015, I used to perform packaging work for the FreeDOS

project. I wasn't pleased with the packaging tool that FreeDOS used back then

(FDPKG), so in 2012 I started working on a new package manager, with network

support, automatic updates, etc - I named it FDNPKG. Later I also devised a

scripted way of generating an "always up to date" FreeDOS CD that I

unimaginatively called "all_cd.iso". This CD included FDNPKG and all the

FreeDOS packages available at the given moment.

I still wasn't satisfied with how FreeDOS clings to its notion of "releases"

and that it cannot include some software because of licensing issues, so in

2016 I decided to create my own distribution, that I called Svarog386 (there

was also a Svarog86 project that I had created a couple of months earlier,

dedicated to 8086 machines). Svarog386 naturally relied on the FreeDOS kernel

and used the FDNPKG package manager.

Then, in 2021, I started to be tired of having two separate distributions to

care about. Over time, FDNPKG also became a huge piece of protected mode code,

and although it was magnificent code, I was no longer happy with it: too many

features, too complex data processing, too high memory requirements... In a

word: too much fluff. I longed for something simpler, that would do perhaps

less, but with more transparency towards the user - and something that would

work in real mode with not much RAM, so it could be useful even on ancient

8086 machines.

The result of these thoughts was SvarDOS: a distribution that replaced both

Svarog86 and Svarog386, and that came with its own package manager - a much

simpler (and in my opinion much more elegant) tool than FDNPKG.