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HX-DOS Extender & Virtual Pascal 2.1.279 (DOSX)

posted by marcov, 10.04.2008, 10:02

> > 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.
>
> A lot of people just aren't aware that FreeDOS is active and could use
> testers. They (especially Eric) have done a lot. It's not as bad a
> platform as it used to be (although there's always room for improvement).
If it is so active, then when didn't they step up? Either they are not interested in these packages, (except for Laaca), or have no time.

Either way you remain in the situation that the tool developers have no direct need for dos, and that the dosers don't have a direct need for the tool. Or how else do you explain the relative inactivity of Dos ports for FPC and VP then? (GPC is still maintained for DJGPP I believe by M. Lombardi, but that's the same guy that did it 10 years ago too, without much help)

Apparently, Dos still has compilers enough, or sb would step up

> And seriously, I find it hard to believe that with all the talented Linux
> coders out there, that no one has the skills to port more stuff to DOS?
Sure. Microsoft probably also had enough people that _could_ maintain dos, but also they don't.

The trick is finding people with interest _and_ skills for these. And they usually have to come from the users circles, since Dos has disappeared from everyday life, and users circle like this one are the only source of dos users.

> > And I don't blame him for that.
>
> He can do what he wants with his free time. I don't blame him at all. But
> it seems silly to complain (not that anyone really is, AFAICT) about lack
> of developers when there isn't anything publicly available to develop.
This is unfair to Allan. Allan spent two years of very busy time (he was moving across countries) to try to build some community.

> > 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)
>
> IDE isn't so important, debugger is but can be lived without (some people
> never use 'em!).
All then remaining VP users considered them of the utmost importantcy. It was the main reason to use VP over FPC.

> So, I wouldn't
> blame him if he didn't bother adding new features. But even releasing the
> runtime library sources could greatly benefit somebody in the future
> (although I dunno who specifically).
The runtime library was also not copyright free. One of the larger chunks (except for TV) was sysutils. A project to port sysutils from FPC failed, due to lacking skills, and a lot of noise on the maillist about what should be done. I tried to help several times, but got flamed for being to FPC centric. Which was true, but the only sane way. Any major changes would upset the stability which was VP's only asset.

But the users kept arguing, and the discussion got crazier and crazier, planning the most difficult things (including rewriting the compiler), but were not able at the same time to port (not develop from scratch, just grab from FPC!) even a relatively simple piece of source like sysutils. This was the third time this happened to an attempt to revive it, so Allan gave up.

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