bloatwaresucks,

for instance, win 95, 98 and me share probably 50% of the same files

That's a completely wrong assessment, but go on.

I think it would be a good idea to first verify that that is actually true.
If removing doubles would not substancially shrink the total size of the CAB
files than your idea would really be putting a lot of energy into something
with a very small return.

Ofcourse, if its your hobby and you want to see how far you can go with it
than I'll be the last to stop you. :-)

does anyone know of any resources for how to do this?

What exactly are you looking for (your current question is a bit too broad)?
And did you already try Google to find some info about CAB files and
installation scripts ?

As for extracting files from a .CAB file under Win98se you can use
"extract.exe" (in \windows\system)

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:
98 Guy "98"@Guy . com schreef in berichtnieuws
...
bloatwaresucks wrote:

does anyone know of any resources for how to do this?
for instance, win 95, 98 and me share probably 50% of the same files

That's a completely wrong assessment, but go on.

......so, if you unpack the installs for each, group the common
files, create a common.files.cab and change all references to
them to point to the cab file. i also want to do this for
firefox, mozilla, netscape or any program for that matter .......

As usual, Dumb-text gave a completely irrelevant answer (which, as
typical for him, involves the use of a virtual machine, because he is
incapable of assembling or obtaining a computer with full driver-support
for windows 98).

Your desire to disassemble and unpack the install packages and cab files
for various software packages and somehow re-engineer the installation
scripts and re-pack the archives in a complex way to draw out the
correct files at install time from a common archive - is a completely
worthless excercise, if it can be done at all.

It's worthless because storage space (be it on a DVD, thumb drive, cloud
storage / web-download or a local hard drive) is available in ridiculous
abundance so as to make any effort to repackage many versions of various
software packages into a space-saving "intelligent" archive of no value
whatsoever.