On Sat, Nov 30, 2024 at 11:49 AM tom ehlert via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Hallo Herr Paul Dufresne via Freedos-devel, > > am Samstag, 30. November 2024 um 16:34 schrieben Sie: > > > > I think we should develop a source package format, that handle > > dependencies, because sources handle > > a lot of libraries, that make a lot dependencies. > > I would be interested to learn about all these dependencies. > > I'm fairly certain that not even a single 16-bit program is dependent > on any 'dependency' (other than the right compiler installed). > > Additionally, I think that these depndencies are at least rare - > if even existent - in 32-bit land. > > I'm also not aware of any programs (in FreeDOS context) depending on > any libraries not supplied by the compilers. > > Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The only dependencies I can think of are things like Kitten (translations) and Getopt. These are not provided by the compiler, but are external libraries. They are not very big. I suppose there's also the use case where a BAT file might use V8 Power Tools, which is a dependency if you want the BAT file to work. These are not very common. Games are probably the more common case where you have dependencies on bigger things like Allegro. The discussion that sparked this thread was about DOjS including a bunch of libraries. But I think that's appropriate for something like DOjS. But it's also not typical for other DOS programs and DOS applications we include. A lot of programs make assumptions about the compiler, and the compiler provides the dependencies. For example: the conio.h (console i/o) and graph.h (colors) features in OpenWatcom vs another C compiler. I would be concerned that adding layers to track dependencies would add unnecessary complexity. FreeDOS (like any DOS) is a simple operating system. While FreeDOS is bigger than MS-DOS because we include more tools and compilers and editors, we're still a very simple operating system. I don't think we need to make FreeDOS more complex for a use case (dependencies) that's easily managed another way. A few packages that are "bigger than they need to be" (like DOjS) because they include a bunch of source dependencies is not a big deal when most of the programs don't have this need. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
