I'm just asking in a benign manner, since this seems to be a Vamp/AROS/base system 3.1.X update, and that OS3.5 must be installed over OS3.1, will the installation of OS3.5 break anything in the new OS3.1.X update?
First, one clarification: This project is not related to Vampire. It is for 68K systems, and by that will most likely also work on the vampire, but there are no tools or resources in it that are specific to it. The Os, as it stands, is capable enough to handle hardware extensions of all kinds, provided its makers want to use them.
Second, this will be a self-contained distribution. It is not meant to be "installed on top" of something. This said, all the components that are currently in existance of course work in AmigaOs 3.9, and this is exactly how I use it and test it. It would be sheer folly to break compatibility with existing distributions. However, we don't have sources or licenses for all Os 3.9 components, so in some cases we *need* to go back to older versions that have been updated for additional functionality.
The HDToolBox is such an example: There are currently no resources to re-implement a reaction-based HDToolBox as found in 3.9. There will be, however, a HDToolBox that looks as bad as the 3.1 version (sigh), but it handles big partitions fine, is able to enable the DirectSCSI flag of the FFS, switch on the long-filename support....
So, things work right, but the GUI is not as fancy as it could.
Now I know what you might reply with.... NO ONE uses OS3.5 and that, possibly, this new OS3.1.X will not be supported in this manner when installing OS3.5?
It will probably replace many components that came with 3.5 with more modern and updated components. I really don't see why anything in 3.5 should break either.
Other question is, when this is released, might there be updated components that could manually be copied over to a fresh OS3.5/3.9 installation?
You should understand that Hyperion will most likely not be able to support such installations, but quite frankly: This is exactly what I am doing here. However, keep care! Not everything 3.9 did will likely be supported by 3.1.4 simply because we do not have sources, or licenses. 3.1.4 will probably come with the 3.1. preferences tools. The Prefs format is documented, so nothing breaks, but some of the extended functionalities of 3.9 will not work due to lack of information, licenses or sources.
To give you an example: 3.9 had a "1:1 GUI" button that rescaled the resize button of windows. This was implemented as part of IPrefs and it *probably* patched up intuition. Now, besides my unwillingness to patch up system componens just for eye candy, the sources of all this stuff is lost, so the feature is lost. A new intuition that implements this natively is out of reach due to incompatibilities we are currently facing with CyberGraphics, and some badly written programs that do not dynamically allocate border space in their windows. (E.g. Workbench & ViNCEd work with rescaled buttons, Kingkong does not... hint, hint...)
So, you get in some cases less functionality (mostly in the eye-candy section) and sometimes more functionality (mostly in the systems layer), such as getting rid of the need to have a 4GB boot partition and getting softlinks.