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HX-DOS Extender & Virtual Pascal 2.1.279 (DOSX)

posted by marcov, 08.04.2008, 13:28

> (BTW, I meant that it's impossible for us or anybody but Allan to fix the
> FILES= bug because of this.)
Assuming that is a RTL problem, there might be more. Best is to start detailing the problem and the fix, and present it as a complete case study on the mentioned site. But the important question is what is the use?

> Why would you "pull the plug" just because "not enough" people use it?
He didn't do that. He pulled the plug because not enough people were contributing, and he had no time anymore. Two attempts to set up a community failed. People were all

> Isn't that a surefire way to minimize number of users?

Maybe, but that is not the point.

> Besides, isn't a handful more than zero? (I don't understand the details, obviously.)
Two possible answers:

1)
This is all not about the users, but about developers. No more developers, two _year_ long attempts to find new ones failed, copyright problems hinder open sourcing it as-is. (which would be a faint, but non-zero chance of somebody pick it up)

2)
And even if the number of users is large than zero, what is that supposed to signify? As long as you have more than one person pretending to be user, you are obliged to keep supporting the thing indefinitely?

> You have to give people time.

Two years and longer. Before VP was in maintenance mode pretty much since 2000.

> What has to be done? (Not what would be nice, but what is a major bug,
> major flaw, etc.??)
During those repeated attempts, most remaining users were interested in new development. Dynamic array support, overloading and int64 support (iow features beyond basic D2 support), and ports to new platforms. However in reality new development would have to replace the copyrighted parts first (including Turbo Vision, and rewriting the IDE to accomodate to changes)

> I don't personally understand why FPC has semi-dropped DOS support.
> Doesn't anybody use DOS anymore?

Very few. But worse, even less _invest_ in it. Not FPC or VP dropped Dos, but the Dos users did, by not participating in significant enough numbers.

> Is it really that hated nowadays? Are
> other platforms (GBA, DS, WinCE) really?? more important?

All platforms are maintained by enough people working hard enough on them to keep it in a releasable state and to build releases, and in general maintain the knowledge about them. Some like Linux and XP that is already done by the core developers, some (like all that you name, but e.g. also OS X that Jonas maintains, or FreeBSD what I do) are kept on their feet by their respective maintainers.

No maintainers, and nobody new for a while? -> no releases can be built.

Somehow this loss for maintainers is more frequent for the MS platforms than for others. I personally think this is not so much MS, but more that the users on those platforms are more used to being "customers", iow not take part in development.

> Did DOS
> coders forget everything they knew? (Doubtful.) So I don't get it. Of
> course, I'm not trying to be impatient (developers often have several
> things they are working on), just slightly in shock that working code
> falls to pieces.
Working code must be kept working. Otherwise you get the problems as with the 1.9.x series of Dos releases (when we still released dos if we could) with a series of broken releases. All breakages by new development were fixed, but nobody debugged it, resulting in poor packaged releases of poor quality.

Maybe this string now comes to an end with finally a decent 2.2.2 release, because I saw that Laaca (also here) submitted some patches. But that is something FPC specific, that for now the rest of the project is still very alive, and has a die hard core to do the non-platform specific part.

This all has happened before, e.g. with BeOS that has been dead for several years, before Olivier started working on it, and also with AmigaOS.

And VP faced a huge "cleanup" stage first before a open source version could be released. The owner/maintainer tried to get this started a few times, and then decided he had invested enough time in it.

And I don't blame him for that.

(copyright)
> Yes, obviously, that has to be omitted in any public release.
Which breaks the IDE and debugger, something the users most extremely valued (e.g. when compared to FPC those are the strong points of VP)

> Well, (no offense, not meant directed at you/yours) but even a
> discontinued "hard-to-maintain" working compiler beats a compiler that
> used to work but doesn't anymore.

You can still download the archive (see the above link). So there is no problem there. There is simply no development anymore. For that a significant investment must be made, and because the current situation can never be free, it would take years for the first usable version reached users.

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