On Thu, 25 May 2017, Jim Hall wrote:
Minibox is an interesting project, but I wonder why implement
everything in one large binary, just to execute simple commands. I
know you are mimicking Busybox (above). But on a DOS system, it seems
very resource heavy to load a large exe that requires DPMI to do
commands like: (from the README)
beep
cat
cd
clear
cp
date
echo
ls
mkdir
mv
pwd
rm
rmdir
sh
time
Wouldn't it be easier and more resource efficient to implement these
as small, individual programs? "cat" is not a very big program, for
example.
This.
There's an interesting parallel here, and I think this would make a
good project for someone: Years ago, there was the "GNUish" project,
which ported the GNU utilities to DOS. But eventually the project
stalled. Before GNUish shut down, they reached out to me to mirror
their files. You can find them here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/gnuish/
Info here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/gnuish/gnuish.htm
I think it would be great for someone to pick up the GNUish project
again. Port the GNU Utilities (ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/) to FreeDOS
using OpenWatcom, or DJGPP. This is likely challenging, as it will
require creating wrappers for different functionality, workarounds for
other functionality that doesn't (or can't?) exist on DOS, etc.
*That* is something that would be really interesting on FreeDOS! We
already have some Unix-like programs in FreeDOS (cal, du, bc, grep,
sed, ...) and a few utilities exist at DJ Delorie's repo, but AFAIK no
one has created a comprehensive update to GNUish.
I think one of the last updates to GNUish was when I got a wild hair and
ported over a then-recent "cpio". That had to be around 2000...
I've thought of doing something similar to GNUish using rewritten code
and/or BSD code but there's not much stuff that ports over without a lot
of rewriting, and back in those days I was a newcomer to C. Maybe I
should try again.
-uso.
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