DOS ain't dead

I had no reason to try FPC 2.6.0 earlier because I am happy with 2.4.2 and with 1.0.10.
However today I look at it and was disappointed.
The first visible problem is in IDE. You can compile any program but the compiled EXE is not run. After some tracking I discovered that problem is in the DosShell function in all FreeVision based applications and it is because of bug in Procedure Exec.
Procedure Exec is in DOS.PP file and these is some bug in procedure EXEC_Ansistring.
I have not tracked it more preciously however not all parameters are properly passed from pascal into DOS environment.
There even sometimes raises a general protection fault when calling Exec with empty command line - "Exec(GetEnv(COMSPEC),'')"

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DOS-u-akbar!

> I have not tracked it more preciously however not all parameters are
> properly passed from pascal into DOS environment.

Tracking further would show that the nested procedure that does this (paste_to_dos) has a comment " {Changed by Laaca - added parameter N}".....

> Tracking further would show that the nested procedure that does this
> (paste_to_dos) has a comment " {Changed by Laaca - added parameter
> N}".....

This comment appeared between 2.0.4 and 2.0.6 when i commited a patch into this code.
Now it is overwritten (by someone other than me) but this comment remained.
However today I tried hard to fix the problem but I was not able to find the problem. I really don't know.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> > Tracking further would show that the nested procedure that does this
> > (paste_to_dos) has a comment " {Changed by Laaca - added parameter
> > N}".....
>
> This comment appeared between 2.0.4 and 2.0.6 when i commited a patch into
> this code.
> Now it is overwritten (by someone other than me) but this comment
> remained.
> However today I tried hard to fix the problem but I was not able to find
> the problem. I really don't know.

Ok, we'll see if sb reacts to the bug.

From SVN logs I think this comes from rearrangements by Pierre to make proxy support work (using !xxx to avoid certain cmdline limits? There were workarounds like this for the compiler itself in 1.0.x series, but I don't know if this is the same thing), so I'll assign it to him.

Setting use_go32v2_proxy to false early in the program might also work.

Good people from FPC development team found and fixed this problem. Thanks guys!
It is nice to see that they fixed so quickly DOS only bug.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> Good people from FPC development team found and fixed this problem.

Actually, sb name Joe Forster did ( http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=21097) mid january, and the problem was already fixed in trunk.

Pierre detected this, and the fix is merged to the fixes branch. He is also working on releasing an update (2.6.0a) of the release archive, since this is a 2 line fix.

> > Good people from FPC development team found and fixed this problem.
>
> Actually, sb name Joe Forster did (
> http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=21097) mid january, and the problem
> was already fixed in trunk.

http://sta.c64.org

> Pierre detected this, and the fix is merged to the fixes branch. He is also
> working on releasing an update (2.6.0a) of the release archive, since this
> is a 2 line fix.

I'm not sure what any of that means. Just updated daily snapshot or wait until another point release?

> > Pierre detected this, and the fix is merged to the fixes branch. He is
> also
> > working on releasing an update (2.6.0a) of the release archive, since
> this
> > is a 2 line fix.
>
> I'm not sure what any of that means. Just updated daily snapshot or wait
> until another point release?

A rerelease of 2.6.0 for dos as 2.6.0a. (the a is to indicate that patches have been applied) I assume it will take about a week.

P.s. I took the opportunity to review dos related patches and merge them to 2.6.1

BTW, what is it the "proxy command line"?
And how to use it?

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DOS-u-akbar!

> BTW, what is it the "proxy command line"?
> And how to use it?

I don't know exactly. Ask Pierre in the bugreport.

I assume !xxxx inserts the contents of environment variable xxxx.

In the past the OS/2 port also had such limits, but afaik the gradual migration from emx to native OS/2 seem to have fixed that.

> A rerelease of 2.6.0 for dos as 2.6.0a. (the a is to indicate that patches
> have been applied) I assume it will take about a week.
>
Why still was not the re-release of 2.6.0?
At least Sourceforge still shows 2.6.0 from date 12.31.2011

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DOS-u-akbar!

> Why still was not the re-release of 2.6.0?

Afaik it is still blocked on the bugreport for testing:

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=21502