DOS ain't dead

GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 18.01.2013, 17:43

> > How active is DJGPP still? To have influence you must first be active,
> no?
> >

DJGPP still has an officially-maintained website and newsgroup and (old but mostly relevant) FAQ.

> > If I go to their site, and click release, all I see are archives from
> the
> > early 2000s.

"Archives" of what exactly? The two mailing lists (one of which mirrors the newsgroup) show plenty of recent activity.

The public development .ZIPs (libc, headers, etc.) for "current" (2.03p2) and "beta" (2.04) are approximately from 2002 and 2004, but they still work fine (more or less). Other .ZIPs for other utils have been updated more recently, esp. GNU software (GCC, et al.). Most, if not all of these, are announced on the newsgroup.

> They are still alive. Andros, for example, provides Fedora crosscompiler
> regulary. He also has GCC 4.7.2 available. Native (DJGPP) versions are
> usually also available on DJGPP ftp mirrors too.

Some work has apparently been done for prereleases of 4.8.0 (see Changes), so we may get packages for that in the next month or two.

> While I haven't (yet) had luck in getting it to work on the distribution I
> am using, I follow it from time to time. But, I'm close. The biggest
> problem is that the patches are scattered all around. I have to decipher
> Red Hat spec file to turn it into something I can use. And, I also don't
> have much experience with crosscompilers ATM. That's a bit of problem too.
> :)

There are various workarounds for that (Ozkan's older cross compilers, native under DOSEMU, CDEpack), but I also admit to not having tried using Red Hat cross compilers (and am skeptical, also due to my inexperience).

> LibC is unfortunatelly only somewhat active in CVS. But Rugxulo is
> following that much more closely than I am and he might know more.

I don't follow it that much, but I am subscribed to djgpp-workers (for whatever reason, I'm not really a contributor). It works as designed, so there is little need to add much except for rare bugfixes or minor tweaks / additions to aid in porting other (usually GNU/Linux) software.

P.S. A year or two, I signed up so I could edit the FreePascal Wiki, specifically the Go32v2 section of the helper tools page. But I've been distracted, as usual, and probably forgot the password. Though I don't think marcov (or maybe anybody??) reads that page, there is no Go32v2 maintainer. (I really don't know why marcov frequents here. He's always welcome, but he mostly focuses on FreeBSD, and I'm not sure he's ever directly used DJGPP at all. I know he's not that dumb re: DOS, but certainly it's of very very very low interest to him.)

Complete thread:

• GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - bocke, 12.01.2013, 20:27 (Announce)
  • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - RayeR, 12.01.2013, 21:39
    • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - Rugxulo, 13.01.2013, 21:07
      • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - bocke, 14.01.2013, 23:05
    • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - bocke, 14.01.2013, 22:30
  • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - marcov, 16.01.2013, 15:12
    • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - RayeR, 16.01.2013, 17:42
    • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - bocke, 18.01.2013, 16:22
      • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - Rugxulo, 18.01.2013, 17:43
        • GNU Automake to drop DJGPP support - bocke, 19.01.2013, 10:02