Hi, On 7/17/11, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > >> XMGR. HIMEMX (AFAICT) has no maintainer (and/or we really need to push >> out that "jmp $+2" fix for old 386s, i.e. unofficial version 3.33, > > In other words, Japheth took over HIMEMX but does not add the patch?
No. In fact, he has explicitly said he is *not* maintainer, hence nobody else ever bothered adding the patch. :-( Yeah, I guess I should've done it, but even I never got around to it (round tuit?). >>> www.freedos.org/software/ >> >> To be completely honest, please don't take this the wrong way, but >> some of those I literally never use (or can't remember how!): >> >> * append >> * assign > > The idea of BASE is to provide at least clones of all commands that > MS DOS users had in their standard installation of MS DOS, while of > course not limiting ourself to that list. You are right that some > tools are less frequently used but almost everything in your list > actually is useful for me... It's fine if you have reasons to use them. I'm not disagreeing with the idea, just saying "in practice" I never, ever, ever use them. I guess that just proves that everybody's tastes, usage, and skills differ. Please don't take it as a "command" that you must never use them and remove them, that's not my goal. Just saying ... perhaps some things we don't need anymore. > Comp: You are right, FC replaces it. Well, yes, I know all (most?) DOSes have both, but FC can do ASCII (default) or binary (/b), so I don't ever use COMP. > Choice: Important for batch scripts. > Exe2bin: Not all software uses compilers which create COM directly. But, IIRC, this was verbatim the version from OpenWatcom. My point was that people who are developers already have it (or similar). If we're going to include it, we should also include "link" (like MS-DOS used to). Also, there's no DOSSHELL or BASIC there either, and nobody complained. So some of these things should really be removed. I do really think exe2bin is useless here. > Fasthelp: Was meant to work like "apropos" in Linux, see htmlhelp. But does it work at all?? I can't remember, maybe I'm thinking of DR-DOS (where it's a no-op). > Graphics: For ESC/P, HP PCL and Postscript printers, but of course > many now make PNG screenshots of their DOS window, no hardcopy. You (should) know I meant no offense by this. And certainly I appreciate all your hard work. But it's still frustrating when hardware just doesn't work. I guess that's a lost battle, there's just too much incompatible stuff out there. :-( > Mirror: Can be sort of replaced by functionality in FORMAT. Fine, good, useful in theory, but rare in practice. > Nlsfunc: Not really clear for me how to use this and CHCP. Also, > neither 2039 nor 2040 support NLSFUNC yet, only unstable 2037. I (very very briefly) booted my i18n floppy yesterday, and I didn't see any obvious errors. int 21h, 6522h apparently still worked (my silly UPPER.COM), NLSFUNC quietly loaded with no problems, and yes I already upgraded to 2040. So who knows. But I of course didn't use CHCP at all. The country data (time, date, currency) seemed to be correctly changed to Greek, so who knows (but perhaps the CONFIG.SYS setting did that, not NLSFUNC.EXE itself, dunno). Oh well, Casino says it ain't urgent, so whatever. Still, I just hope it doesn't affect anybody negatively. > Print: Not really useful with modern printers but some like it. If it works, keep it. Unfortunately, I think it doesn't for most people. Hardware-specific things like this that only work for %0.01 of the world should probably not be in "BASE". Just MHO, sorry. :-( > Recover / unformat: Partially also in FORMAT? Ugh, I'm not sure I've ever used any version of this, but it sounds useless (IIRC). Recover is like 0.1, and it pretty much destroys everything (on floppy??) except raw text data. So I would be very VERY surprised if anyone used this. I'd rather have a "real" tool like WDE in "BASE" instead. > Share: Apparently useful for Windows and similar software? Yes, which is good and fine, but still rare for most people. Seriously, how many of us use Win3x? I'm not discounting it, just saying, "by itself" Share is fairly useless (right??). Keep in mind that you can't get Win3x at all anymore except via eBay or perhaps (??) MSDN. Good luck getting it to work on modern hardware!! (I consider bare DOS better than Win3x, but of course it had some advantages, e.g. multitasking.) If Win3x were freeware, I'd agree, but since it's not and never will be .... > Tree: How else do you check your directory tree? I use "LCD". Check it for what? I don't use it. If I need to find a file, I use an appropriate tool (or even "dir /s"). Actually, a real file manager would be more useful here (e.g. Doszip, but that's 386+). > Undelete: In what way buggy for FAT32? It is just horribly non- > user-friendly as far as I remember. I just meant that you hacked it to (sorta) work but not perfectly. I never heard of anyone heavily using it or testing it. I'd almost prefer if we just made our own DelWatch (or whatever) clone, e.g. just rename / move / compress certain files to a "special" dir instead of truly deleting them. But never mind, just thinking out loud (again). >> I mean, if we want to mirror MS-DOS, we should include BWBasic > > BWBasic, the Shell-based GWBasic clone? That was pretty painful > to use but of course it is much smaller than the cool freebasic. Better than nothing, but I admit I haven't heavily messed with it (only barely). Suffixes like '%' are ignored (precision is always one size anyways) and variables are case sensitive (!), hates ' comments, but otherwise it seems fairly sane. Or perhaps a C-based interpreter (what ever happened to Detlef? AWOL again??) would be more accepted by most people. Or maybe Desmet C (GPL), it's certainly small enough! Or even Dev86 (which I "almost" compiled with DJGPP the other day, but I didn't test the binaries; it may? still build with Microsoft C 16-bit host, else just use old prebuilt 0.16.2 binaries.) I'd probably prefer Rexx (Regina) instead, personally, but I doubt anybody agrees. > I do like SED but if we go that way, I would like EGREP, SORT, > UNIQ, WC, XXD etc. We already have xgrep (somewhere), which is indeed useful. The others are good but less useful to me personally. >> Perhaps we should include Awk (old Mawk 1.2.2? old 16-bit Gawk 3.0.6?) > > Awk has awkful syntax, but some people like it... No worse than sh, Tcl, Perl, Ruby, etc. etc. >> reminds me, MOVE still needs the +R bug fixed. > > Poke the maintainer, although I only give +R any priority at all. What maintainer? Seriously, it's been years since I reported the bug! At one time I had a wimpy TC-only patch of my own creation, but I never got around to feeling comfortable with an OW build (for some obscure reason I forget now, "/s" ??). Please don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes supporting FreeDOS is a lonely job. :-( ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on "Lean Startup Secrets Revealed." This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
