Post by Luchezar GeorgievWell, this should be the small obstacle that serves as a test, whether a
given developer is smart enough to build 4DOS, which you just proved for
yourself! ;-)
It's a bit discouraging for potential contributors, IMO. I consider
myself lucky that you are still around. If we want 4DOS to live longer or
even maybe forever, it should be made as easy as possible for
programmers also - regardless how dumb he/she can be. Who knows, even
the dumbest of the dumbest can spark a silly but good idea. After all,
the 4DOS is very short in contributors.
Post by Luchezar GeorgievNow, do you think that it's better to add this file to the
patch "by hand", if "diff" can't do this automatically? If so, I will do it.
Since building preparations are mostly manual, it would be better if
there is a batch file that can automate the patches, setup the MSC7.BTM
file and check all required tools according to the user provided paths.
Consider it as a development environment setup application. Including
the batch file in the patch package itself would be best, IMO.
Post by Luchezar GeorgievPlease, test it by comparing it byte-by-byte with my binary files. It
should differ only in a few bytes where the __DATE__ is put (2 for the
date, 1 space and 3 for the month, or 6 only bytes in total!). FreeDOS
COMP does the best job here. It shows you the differences in hexadecimal
and in ASCII, at the same time.
I've tested them and the difference is only the month and the date
portion of the text - 5 bytes in total (the space character position is
identical).
Post by Luchezar GeorgievNote that you need to have a DOS or Windows 9x environment in order to
test 4DOS properly. I build it in DOS or Windows 98 (SE), and test it
there too. Never tried to BUILD it in an NT environment but you've
proved that this is possible. So far, so good, but this is not the
environment 4DOS is designed to RUN in.
No, I never consider Windows to be a good DOS testing environment even
under Windows 98 safe mode simply because Windows interferes the system
too much. My system is dual boot to Windows XP NTFS and to DOS FAT-32
(this includes FreeDOS, Windows 98 DOS and Windows 98). I had to abandon
Windows 98 for my main OS since there's no driver for my nForce
motherboard and since I'm only doing a test build. And no, I don't use
4DOS for my Windows XP because it's much slower than TCC.
Post by Luchezar GeorgievIf you take over 4DOS
maintenance, you could get complaints from DOS / Windows 9x users saying
that something is wrong in their environment, if you haven't tested how
it runs there after a change but only in your NT.
For me, real mainteance is keeping the website up to date which I'm not
very good at. If I do become the only contributor left, I would hand the
website maintenance to other person who dwells in this newsgroup longer
than me, a long time 4DOS user, already has a 4DOS dedicated web page
and knows to handle website better than me (I'm just a novice :p ).
Post by Luchezar GeorgievI also have SIX different DOS versions
and if I do a DOS-specific change, test how it runs in all of them (but
if you don't do such changes, you may save this trouble for yourself).
I do have many of other DOS versions in archive for testing and
educational purposes. Still have plenty of room in my FAT-32 partition
and multi boot entries. So that won't be a problem.
But really, I'm not aiming to become a 4DOS maintainer, just a free
contributor which are not bound by anything except for my own
contributions as a programmer. Besides, I still don't fully know the
general inner working of 4DOS. Any single error can be disasterous. It
would be too risky to make a public 4DOS.COM patch at this time.