Hi,
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 8:49 PM, Bret Johnson <bretj...@juno.com> wrote:
>
> > On 10/17/2017 8:44 AM, Jim Hall wrote:
> >> (1) What does "Base" mean in 2017 or 2018? I think there are some
> >> packages we might take out of "Base" and move into a "Compat" package
> >> group, such as:
> >>
> >> APPEND
> >> ASSIGN
> >> GRAPHICS
> >> JOIN
> >> SUBST
> >> others?
>
> I actually use SUBST a lot and sometimes also use ASSIGN, but not the
others you have listed.
> They are actually necessary for the way I do things on my modern systems
-- they allow me to
> keep my drive letters consistent no matter where I run DOS from (booting
to real DOS, running
> DOS in a VM, and even running it on different machines). DOS programs
tend to be pretty picky
> about drive letters, and keeping them consistent allows me to just copy
things back and forth as
> I need with very few problems and much less confusion.
Okay, but I have to ask ... do you use MS-DOS SUBST or (also) FreeDOS?
And here lies the rub. Nobody maintains or tests some of these old utils.
Some of them have obscure bugs or maybe don't work well at all. I'm not
really complaining about anyone, free time is always scarce, just that the
situation itself is less than ideal. (And we still have TurboC-only utils,
which is annoying. Everything really needs to migrate to OpenWatcom.)
No matter what we remove, it will still be available "somewhere",
preferably on iBiblio. So that's an easy fetch via FTP (or HTTP). It's not
hard, by any stretch, for potential end users to find these things, if they
direly need them in the future. "BASE" is really unwieldy and too big right
now. You truly don't need much to run a minimal DOS installation.
But indeed, there is little advantage to including obscure things like
EXE2BIN (which nobody uses by itself, AFAIK, and it just comes from
OpenWatcom anyways).
I could continue to argue about bloat or rarely-used functionality until
the cows come home, but I won't.
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