4.1. Included files on the update medium

All the files for the Vendor Update sit in the base directory ( see Section 2.1) of the Update Media.

Each Vendor Update must be accompanied by at least two files.

• One installation script with the suffix .ins

• and one description file with the suffix .des

YaST first looks at all files with a .ins extension. These are the installation script files, one per Vendor Update. The file name (without the .ins extension) serves as a key to identify the Vendor Update and the accompanying description files. This makes it possible to put multiple Vendor Updates into one directory.

The installation script is free to do what it wants. Usually, the script should first check if it's applicable. Probing the hardware and checking the kernel version are minimum requirements to be checked by the script. The YaST Vendor CD module executes this script with the full path to the base directory as parameter. Based on this parameter, the script can easily extract further data from the CD.

Keep in mind that only standard linux tools will be available. For example, perl is considered a standard tool, tcl is not. And the script together with any data on the CD should be self-contained.. It should not have any package dependencies which exceed a minimal installation.

There should be multiple description files for each Vendor Update, one per supported language. At least a default (in English) should be provided. The description files have .desc as the extension start with the name (key) of the corresponding .ins file. In order to support multiple language description files, YaST appends the ISO language code to the Vendor update name before loading the default description file. For example, the ISO language code for British English is en_GB. The english description file for a Vendor Update called modem would be modem-en_GB.desc. If the full (5-char) ISO code cannot be found, YaST falls back to the two char language code. With this mechanism, several languages (i.e. de_AT for Austrian, de_CH for Swiss, and de_DE for German) can be supported by a single description file called modem-de.desc In order to support non ISO-1 (non western europe / us) languages, like Japanese, the description file must be coded in UTF8. UTF8 is the standard coding used in Linux.

		linux/
		`-- suse/
		    `-- i386-8.1/
			`-- modem.ins
			`-- modem.desc
			`-- modem-zh_CN.desc
			`-- modem-ja_JP.desc
			`-- speedblazer.ins
			`-- speedblazer.desc
			`-- speedblazer-de.desc
			`-- speedblazer-fr.desc
			`-- speedblazer-pt_BR.desc
		

The .desc files without a language code should contain the default description in English.