Eric Auer schrieb: >> I've read claims that it's Eric's fault that most of the remaining >> kernel developers [have quit] now but I haven't read yet enough of >> the old discussions to have an opinion on that. > > I probably contributed to frustrating developers of the > unstable branch (Lucho / Arkady) because I disagreed on > their idea that "if code did not change recently then we > can say it is stable". Instead, my impression was and is > that the unstable branch of the kernel contains serious > modifications (also by Jeremy who is not available for > feedback, missing in action?) which need review before > that branch can be called stable...
Well, you could never make any changes. Because you test it on your computer and it works great, but on another computer it will break (due to BIOS bugs or whatever). When seriously developing an operating system you need some automatic testing. Changes in cvs get automatically build and get distributed over a bunch of different test computers doing a series of stress tests. coreboot has a good description how them to it http://www.coreboot.org/Distributed_and_Automated_Testsystem FreeDOS has none of them, neither a bunch of different test computers, nor masses of always active and constructive human testers and not even a batch to test all it's features or to test compatibility or stress test. Well, there is memtest and xmstest and some other small tools but in the end no serious batch you can run to test whenever a change in the kernel or a tsr will make trouble in future with something. FreeDOS users count and developers count seams decreasing which is an indicator that the current strategy is not effective. I would like it more like: add new fancy features (with bugs) -> show the project is alive -> attract new users -> attract new testers -> attract new developers -> fix bugs -> attract even more people. For some time the FreeDOS users must have thought them can change the world, the FreeDOS-32 project looked very promising but now its fall asleep. You could even let the FreeDOS 1.0 stable distribution as it is and focus on beta builds only for a few years (adding fancy features, not so much discussion of principles) and stabilize later after new users have been attracted. -mr ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
