An Introduction to BootZilla v1.0
First and foremost, the new design dictates a fully modular scripting structure, which enumerates little scripts and processes the download, update, and decompression of tools into their appropriate places. This approach makes patching the toolkit a breeze, and simplifies the ability to make BootZilla easily tailored for your uses.
The first part of development involved creating a proof of concept, which was completed in January 2015. During development, a lot of pitfalls were found in the initial proof of concept design. The core functionality of the BZBuilder script has not changed, however, as it was designed to be as simple as possible, possessing only the core information about the toolkit, and inializing the loop that runs through all the cmdlets in the cmdlets sub-directory.
Cmdlets: What are they?
Windows Batch Scripts come in either *.bat or *.cmd file extensions. *.bat is a leftover backward compatibility extension from the DOS days. *.cmd literally means “CoMmanD script”. A CMDLet is literally a command script applet. Each cmdlet is a small script consisting of instructions that will process an application’s download, decompression, and configuration within the BootZilla toolkit.
What this means is that we can actually bundle configuration files in with the cmdlet, and have them be placed alongside the decompressed tool (for things like ccleaner, you can include the ccleaner.ini profile, and winapp2.ini files) – your customizations to these tools’ profiles will be retained between builds of BZ. Some tools also generate dat files for preferences, which will also be looked for within the cmdlets directory. From here on out, all included apps will have their own “appname_version.cmd” file, where version typically will be either x86 or x64. In this way, an X86-only or X64-only toolkit can easily be built from the same build script, with minimal interaction from the user.
If you don’t want a particular tool, you can simply remove the cmdlet you don’t want. In turn, you can customize the toolkit for your particular needs. Patching BootZilla to a newer release, however, may replace these deleted scripts due to the fact that the patch functionality just extracts a patch archive in-place, overwriting old files.