Since there is a discussion about FreeCOM on the freedos-user list, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about its flaws and suggestions on how to fix them. I'm willing to contribute myself too, but I'm not familiar with the development practices here so I'd rather ask everyone here first.
1. I think the beep on automatic filename completion should either be removed or there should be a way to disable it. Sure, I can compile my own version of FreeCOM to remove it, but I think the end user should have a way to disable it too, and I think most people would prefer having that long and noisy beep disabled by default. 2. As it appears to have been suggested a long time ago ( http://www.mail-archive.com/freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg05963.html ), DIR /? should mention the /LFN option, because until I looked into the source code and archives of this mailing list, I didn't even know it existed! (And how is it not ignored anyway? optScanFct in cmd\dir.c lists it after the /L option! Does it work by chance because of undefined compiler behavior?) I can mention it in my localization file for Slovene (SL - available on the FreeDOS localization project), but I'd like to see other localization files include it too. Also, maybe it should be set by default in DIRCMD so new users (who install FreeDOS from the CD) can see that FreeCOM indeed supports LFNs. I myself was skeptical of FreeCOM's LFN support until I tried using some of its internal commands (MKDIR, COPY, etc.) with LFNs because - so I thought - if LFNs are supported, then surely the DIR command should show them? What's the point of using LFNs anyway if you can't see them in a directory listing? 3. What's the deal with DOSKEY features? FreeCOM claims to have them built-in (if compiled with them of course), but the text string TEXT_CMDHELP_ORIGINAL_DOSKEY (which I've never encountered because DOSKEY /? displays TEXT_CMDHELP_DOSKEY - is the former unused?) says that, for example, F7 and Alt+F7 are supported. Using them just makes FreeCOM beep at me. Were those features implemented and removed, or never implemented at all? I would like to have a way to clear the command history. Also, while this is not a suggestion for improvement, it is related to FreeCOM anyway: when I compiled my own FreeCOM with my Slovene localization file, it compiled fine "out of the box" with OpenWatcom 1.9 (I changed nothing; only did the minimal changes to get it to compile on my system), but the resulting COMMAND.COM can't be made a permanent shell in FDCONFIG.SYS. If I do set it as a shell, I get "MCB chain corrupt" errors when loading drivers, and that can't be good. My workaround so far has been to load the original English COMMAND.COM as the first permanent shell, then load my translated COMMAND.COM in AUTOEXEC.BAT with the /P option. Does anyone have any ideas? Also, for some reason, the English COMMAND.COM is 66K, while my translated version is 83K, and I believe they have the same functionality compiled in. I apologize if any of this sounded too harsh, but my intention was only to give some suggestions because I'd like to help improve FreeCOM. Matej Horvat http://matejhorvat.si/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
