On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 8:50 PM Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
[..]
> So, what to do? Some type of feature freeze? Maybe a
> roadmap of what stuff we want to port from fdpp to
> FreeDOS, or how to get fdpp to run on hardware? For
> that one would have to know which stuff fdpp improved
> but even that information is spread over zillions of
> interdependent patches of all sizes and hard to grasp.
>
> Maybe some of you have shorter and more productive
> ideas to what can be done here. I would be glad :-)
>
On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 7:00 AM Robert Riebisch <r...@bttr-software.de> wrote:
[..]
> I try to summarize: Communication is the key.
> And I totally agree.
> FreeDOS communication is cluttered:
> - Mailing lists
> - IRC
> - Code, issues, PRs on GitHub
> - Bug Reports on SF.net
> - Facebook
> - Slack
> - Usenet newsgroups (Anyone even remembers alt.os.free-dos?)
> - Wiki ...
>
This is a very good point. We have a bunch of different ways for
people to communicate. Some of that is because I've been willing to
experiment with some new modes ("going where people are having
discussions") and some of that is because others have experimented
with new modes and I've adopted them (link to them) on the website.
But mostly it's because I hadn't *removed* lesser-used communication
channels from the website. So we have all these places linked from the
"Forums" page, but some places are not very populated.
My comments/questions on a few ways we communicate:
Email lists
<https://www.freedos.org/forums/>
We obviously use the freedos-devel and freedos-user email lists.
But the freedos-kernel list is not used very much. Looking at the
archive, this hasn't seen more than a few emails per *year* in the
last several years. What if we retired the freedos-kernel list and
encouraged any kernel development discussion to happen on
freedos-devel?
Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/groups/freedos/>
This is seeing a lot of discussion. I'd generally describe it as a
place where people talk about how they are using FreeDOS.
Twitter
<https://twitter.com/freedos_project>
I use this pretty frequently, but usually to "broadcast" stuff
happening in FreeDOS. I tweet out any news items here as an "ICYMI"
(In Case You Missed It) and I share other FreeDOS-related news that
isn't always something worth putting on the website. For example, I
recently restarted the FreeDOS Blog, where I'm posting articles about
the videos I'm recording for the FreeDOS YouTube channel. I share
links to each blog item as I post them - but posting those links to
the website as "news items" would be too much.
* I also share stories from people on Twitter, about FreeDOS. For
example, someone will say they've used FreeDOS for this or that thing,
and I'll retweet that.
* I also will tweet small news items from the FreeDOS Twitter account
that I wouldn't usually post on the website. Generally, when someone
announces a new project for FreeDOS (usually a game) I'll tweet about
it. If they keep making releases and it's clear the project is
actually going somewhere, that's when I'll make news items about it on
the website.
YouTube
<https://www.youtube.com/freedosproject>
I started doing weekly videos about FreeDOS. These fall into 4 categories:
1. "Using FreeDOS" - showing off things from the FreeDOS distribution
(as Robert described it, "FreeDOS in action")
2. "DOS applications" - demo'ing DOS programs running on FreeDOS
(As-Easy-As spreadsheet, Word for DOS, etc.)
3. "Let's play" - demo'ing DOS games running on FreeDOS (mostly
shareware and other proprietary games)
4. "FreeDOS programming" - this also includes a new video series I
started for my Patreon, where I teach how to write FreeDOS programs in
C
*More info on that at https://www.freedos.org/c/
* There's some chat in the YouTube comments, but most of these are
about the videos themselves.
Blogger
<https://freedos-project.blogspot.com/>
I had been doing a lot of writing here until about a year ago. In
March, I started posting articles based on the YouTube videos. I
include more detail and background info than made it into the videos.
DOS Ain't Dead
<http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/index.php>
This isn't a "FreeDOS" forum, but I follow it and re-post any
interesting announcements on the FreeDOS Twitter, or the website,
depending on topic.
And some lesser used communication channels:
Slack
I don't hang out there very often, and when I do I'm not seeing
traffic or discussion there.
IRC
Very rare that I go there. I just went there now and there are 42
people logged in. So maybe this is getting used, and I don't see it
because I'm not really there?
USENET
Not much traffic to alt.os.free-dos, but looks like there's still
FreeDOS-related discussion on comp.os.msdos.programmer and
comp.os.msdos.misc. I link to all of these on the website (on the
Forums page) but maybe I shouldn't make them so prominent with the
"Join" button?
And we also have the Wiki for documentation and other information, and
the bug tracker on SourceForge to track bugs and feature requests.
Jim
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