Maybe is a time to consider whether to break the MS-DOS compatibility about
handling the one physical diskette drive as two logical drives - A: and B:

It maybe had some reason in 1982 but now?

For remembering:

You have the physical drive A: only. You write DIR A: Everything goes as 
expected.

But if you write DIR B: you get this message:

"Remove diskette in drive A: Insert diskette in drive B:"

Systems waits for keypress and then displays content of A:




It is extremely annoying because with this behaviour suffer virtually all 
DOS programs. Even the fullscreen programs.

Try it in some fancy text-mode IDE like SetEdit.

You are in the fileselector and you write there B:\

Again. The screen is garbaged by idiotic message "Remove diskette in drive
A: Insert diskette in drive B:"

And even in GUI programs is this "feature" still present. Try f.e. editor 
FLwrite.

>From a programmer 's point of view it is quite difficult to avoid this DJ 
system. The proper approach is to check whether the specified disk drive is
physical drive or fantom drive and to handle it...

But why?

Even Windows 95 has gone farewell to fantoming A: to B:

FreeDOS kernel should do the same.

For now I have in my AUTOEXEC.BAT the line "JOIN B: C:\FREEDOS\JOIN_B\"

But I don't want to do it.

If you from some reason think that DJ system is something good (why?) you 
can implement a new switch for CONFIG.SYS (FDCONFIG.SYS) like "FANTOMB=YES/
NO" (with default NO) or to use a existing parameter SWITCHES to include 
some new switch for fantoming B:



_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel

Reply via email to