Hi,
On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 9:36 PM, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/29/2017 3:04 PM, Jim Hall wrote:
>>
> IMHO, screw the FSF. Seriously. It has turned into one of those almost
> religious fanatics entities that pretend to be "more pious than the
> pope" (a translation of a German saying).
Admittedly, the FSF (and pals) haven't done a whole lot for DOS
lately. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they still help a little here and
there. Back in the day (ten years ago?) GNU was still (barely)
somewhat sympathetic to DJGPP and still somewhat friendly and helpful
(e.g. AutoTools). Nowadays, I dunno, I don't even try to waste my time
because most (or almost all) flat out ignore and reject DJGPP patches.
But we still keep getting DJGPP builds of newer GCCs (and a few other
tools), so "somebody" cares and still does some work.
But I can sympathize with the FSF here a little. They've given a lot
(via GNU, e.g. GCC et al) and haven't received much back. There are
very few, if any, DJGPP contributors anymore. And all work needs
either DOSEMU or NTVDM (for ./configure via ancient Bash 2.x), neither
of which is ideal since neither is a native DOS. And, while I hate to
say it, DOS has severe lacks of hardware support (e.g. drivers). So,
while most PCs can run DOS (with BIOS, which is usually non-free) and
it supports unique hardware (what else runs on "IA-16"? ELKS? old
Minix 2.0.2?) and is well-documented, they seem to prefer focusing on
"better" targets (like GNU/Hurd, heheh ... and Linux, of course).
So part of the problem is that some GNU tools don't run well natively.
Sure, you can work around it, but nobody bothers. It's easier for them
to still rely heavily on NTVDM or cross-compilation than bother
pretending that GCC (or whatever) can build itself in raw native DOS.
I would prefer if most (or all?) DOS programs could be natively
compiled (although not opposed to optional cross-compilation), but it
seems like I'm the only one. Too heavy reliance on NTVDM (still!) is
"bad", IMHO. Obviously one big obstacle is LFNs, but I feel like it's
much more than that. I wish people were more zealous, more diligent,
but it's apparently asking too much.
So, even compared to ten or fifteen years ago, we're worse off. There
used to be tons of DJGPP support, but almost all of that dried up.
It's strange, to me, but I guess people moved on to better targets
(AMD64) or "real life" took over or maybe NTVDM just sucked too much
for them to care anymore. (That last one is all too true, but I
suspect it's more than just that one problem as well.)
> MS/PC-DOS predates the FSF, GPL and the Stallman virus. DOS itself (in
> pretty much any incarnation, up to and including FreeDOS itself) has
> always been depending on "less-than free" development tools.
Again, it's not hard to convert the kernel to other tools. People do
things like that (and much harder) all the time. We just haven't done
it yet. Nobody has done the work, but it's far from impossible.
>> That said, I'd love to see other tools become part of FreeDOS. If
>> there was a DOS-native GCC that could generate 16-bit binaries in the
>> different memory models, I'm all for that.
> Don't hold your breath Jim. If there aren't any folks interested anymore
> in maintaining OpenWatcom, how do you think there will be people
> interested in spending their time on a behemoth of compiler to provide
> the work necessary to develop that. Even DJ Delorie way back then
> (started in 1989, pretty much unmaintained since 1998/1999) went (kind
> of) the easy way out, going the 32 bit, protected mode, flat memory mode
> route...
I already mentioned that FPC 3.0.2 officially supports i8086-msdos
with all memory models (except Huge, which is "trunk", aka next major
version) since 2015.
BTW, DJGPP hasn't been unmaintained but maybe hasn't seen major
development in recent years, only minor fixes and updates. It's still
maintained, they updated to 2.05 (finally) in 2015 from 2.03p2
("current" since 2001) and 2.04 ("beta" since 2003). We've still been
getting latest GCCs for many years now.
> for Digital Mars C/C++, which is not Open Source, but still a high end,
> freely available compiler with a plain 16bit DOS target (though the
> compiler, pretty much like OpenWatcom, doesn't itself run on DOS anymore).
OpenWatcom 1.9 runs natively on DOS. Are you referring to 2.0-pre?
Honestly, I never bothered trying those snapshots, but I think they
still support DOS host as well. 2.0-pre added AMD64 (Win64? Linux64?)
support. Maybe that's what you meant?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
