Hi again, I was thinking about this old email and thought I should clarify (in a technical sense).
(comments below) On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 6:56 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > Here's the thing: I've had years of direct experience with Stallman. > > He calls DOS a "DOG operating system." The FSF and GNU websites > actually referred to MS-DOS as "the M$-DOG operating system" for > years. When I talked to Stallman about it, he doubled down on that > statement and said I was a "DOG man" because I worked on FreeDOS. And > he said anyone who uses FreeDOS is a "DOG user." Maybe Stallman > thought that was funny. FreeDOS is my favorite operating system. I've spent thousands of hours playing with it. I also like dogs, so never would I be offended by being called a "dog man". It's entirely possible that Richard dislikes DOS that much. It's also possible that he was just being funny. Either explanation is irrelevant because our enjoyment and use of FreeDOS does not rely on his preferences. "A poor carpenter blames his tools." But FSF used to sell CD-ROMs with DJGPP binaries. "Current" DJGPP 2.05 has Emacs 28.2 and GCC 12.2. So how bad can DOS be? I actually am pretty sure that "MSDOG" is an old article by Morten Welinder (a big contributor to DJGPP and Emacs back in the day). * http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/msdog.html * https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Acknowledgments.html The article by Morten is mostly technical in complaints but also obsolete (written in 1995). It covers "file system", "kernel", "shell" (the main culprit, by far), and "utilities". (Don't like FreeDOS? Fix it! "Patches welcome.") A lot of it doesn't apply universally to all DOSes anymore. It mostly targets MS-DOS 6.22. So specific bugs don't exist with other vendors, and all known improvements and workarounds are not mentioned (solving at least 80% of the problems). In particular, like I said, Morten contributed to DJGPP, which was always a *huge* boon to developers with many excellent tools that (also) avoided or fixed most of these problems. If the default DOS shell is despised as too weak or buggy (e.g. GNU Make wisely avoids it, if possible), there are plenty of other scripting tools available. In summary, out of 38 complaints: improved: 1, 3, 7, 8 workaround: 9, 15, 16, 17, 23, 25, 27, 30 vendor-specific: 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 14, 18, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38 irrelevant: 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 24, 31, 32, 36 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
