On at 2024-11-16 01:59 -0500, Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel wrote:
Hi All,
As we are most likely approaching the release of FreeDOS 1.4 in the very near
future, we are coming to the point where we will begin to look at the monthly
Interim Test Release builds of the operating system as Release Candidates.
At that point any large or complex changes will no longer be made until after
the next OS release. T2412 may be the final Interim build and T2501 could very
well be the first Release Candidate.
Since T2411, there have only been a couple suggestions for changes. Mostly in
regards to reducing the size of a couple packages. Eric and I updated several
of those packages to save some space on the install media.
Likewise, yesterday a I updated BWBasic to version 3.30 that dropped a couple
days ago. Including, UPX compression of the binary which will cut its installed
size roughly in half.
Are there any general or package groups changes anyone would like to see made
before we move from Interim Builds to Release Candidates?
I have two points to add:
1. It seems that lDebug is still not included in the interim builds. I
checked the FullUSB [1] and BonusCD [2] images and didn't find an lDebug
package in either. (Besides, I found that it was difficult to find the
links for downloading the interim build. The freedos.org website doesn't
seem to point to them anywhere, so I had to look at the mailing list
announcement [3] to find the links.) It would most likely go to the
DEVEL section. FreeDOS Debug is included in BASE but I don't think
lDebug should go there.
Relatedly, I am about to finish the next release, lDebug release 9 [4].
It will likely be done prior to the new year. It includes some bugfixes
and a bunch of new Extensions for lDebug (ELDs). I just added a DCO7
(Debugger Common Options) flag to avoid a crash when loading the
debugger as a device driver (in CONFIG.SYS or using a patched DEVLOAD)
and specifying a flat binary file on the device command line. I'm
considering to default enable the immediate assembler (inspired by D86)
and the Heatshrink compression of help pages before the release.
Further, this updates the lDOS boot32 loader included in instsect.com to
the FSIBOOT5 revision, the latest and greatest.
2. I think that the UPX binaries shipped by FreeDOS are linked with the
NRV compressor library, which is nonfree and closed source. This is
obviously not desirable.
Regards,
ecm
[1]:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/FDT2411-FullUSB.zip
[2]:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/FDT2411-BonusCD.zip
[3]: https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/58836419/
[4]: https://pushbx.org/ecm/doc/ldebug.htm#news-r9
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