Hi, I'm with Kirn on this one. I think people have a wrong idea what people use FreeDOS for, if at all. First of all, I think that the assumption that there's a mahoosive community out there might be a wee bit optimistic. It's probably rather modest, as not too many people these days use DOS for anything but playing old games or running legacy software. If we were to organize a developer conference, we'd probably not be required to book the Royal Albert Hall.
Looking at how just about any operating system has come over the years, you always get a basic system with close to no development tools. They've always been something you install from a secondary source, like a supplemental disk (or disk set as it was in the days before the CDROM). Now, notwithstanding that anyone choosing ia16gcc over watcom is a glutton for punishment to begin with, I don't think it needs to be on the base install medium. In fact, I think the Base CD is bloated enough as it is, with a lot of tools that most users will never install, and in most cases won't have a scooby-doo what they do in the first place. Jim correctly pointed out that there's quite a bit of overlap between the LiveCD and the Bonus CD. Honestly, I'd prefer a 3-tier split, actually. The Base CD should be somewhere around 300MB max. If you still insist on a Basic interpreter (for nostalgic reasons or somesuch) put Bywater on it and all's good. Add to that some basic networking tools, dillo and one or two editors that the average user can actually use without a computer science degree or a 10 year nerd history. I've seen university graduates with top grades fall apart when presented with nothing but vi for an editor. It's an advanced user's choice, so it doesn't take anything away from the system to put it on an extra disk. The best solution would be three disks: BaseCD - no bigger than 300MB, only basic tools ApplicationCD - Editors, Gemes, Utilities - the lot DeveloperCD - what it says on the tin: all that concerns development. It could actually contain a lot more packages as it does now. For instance it could contain freeware'd former commercial software, like the Borland C 4.5 command line tools or source packages, like the open-sourced Wolfenstein 3D, which would help developers learn about advanced programming techniques. sorry, I'm hopelessly useless at keeping my replies short. cheers, Danilo On Thu, 5 Oct 2023 at 07:47, Kirn Gill via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > I think you're blinded by DJGPP. At no point did I argue for keeping THAT > mess in... or gcc-ia16. You just assumed that I would, so assumed that's > exactly what I was advocating for. No, keep it simple. A "base" disc's dev > tools shouldn't take more than 20MB at most. An assembler, a basic 16-bit C > compiler (Small C?), a 'make' tool of some sort, a cheap linker (if the > compiler and assembler don't already include these.) Maybe FreeBASIC. The > largest piece of this would be FreeBASIC at 8MB for version 1.10 released > this year. It's been a while since I've looked, but certainly one could ship > basic dev tools on the base disc and leave the heavyweight GNU crap for the > supplemental disc. > -- > Kirn Gill II > Mobile: +1 813-300-2330 > VoIP: +1 813-704-0420 > Email: segin2...@gmail.com > LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kirn-gill/32/49a/9a6 > > > On Wed, Oct 4, 2023 at 7:53 PM Ralf Quint via Freedos-devel > <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: >> >> On 10/3/2023 11:30 AM, Michael Brutman via Freedos-devel wrote: >> > There is no point in punishing everybody by shipping tools that most >> > people don't use. You can probably count all of the active DOS >> > developers on your fingers and toes. >> > >> > All of the various tools and compilers remain available for download. >> > Not being on the CD image is not the barrier it used to be. >> >> But could you consider that there are so few people programming in and >> for DOS simply because there are no simple to use programming >> environments available and instead some folks keep pushing oversized >> Linux influenced behemoths of programming environment which need to be >> shoehorned to run and produce results within the basic limitations of DOS? >> >> >> Ralf >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Freedos-devel mailing list >> Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
