Hi Tom, Maarten, Jerome and Rugxulo, >> I emailed with Jim the other day. He is extremely busy at present.
> fine. we should look for a new boss with more time to care. Not THAT, permanently, busy - Jim is busy at the MOMENT with some current news :-) Regarding Maarten's mail: No need for complicated excuses... Simply don't send patches for kernel and command.com: At least I am happy with your help such as translations or testing :-) Actually it was Jack himself who suggested to remove XMGR and the storage drivers. While the context may be complex, I agree that it is better to use HIMEMX for XMS / HMA boot style and JEMMEX or, in some cases better, a combine-with-HIMEM classic EMM386 driver for EMS / UMB / XMS / HMA boot style. I also agree with Rugxulo that a boot default should probably be only XMS / HMA. It is cool to have UMB / EMS and it is cool to have virtual A20 by using EMM drivers, but sometimes there are compatibility issues. So it should be user choice to enable EMM drivers, not the default setting. Regarding Jack's storage drivers: I like them and I see no reason to exclude them, but it is a pity that there only is the choice between one older version with sources and one newer but closed source version. As the distro is trying to be completely open, it should probably ship the older open drivers. It can still mention the newer branch. In any case, I would NOT enable the storage drivers by default! On many computers, they are not required and simply improve speed. As the old version misses some bug fixes, users should be able to make their own decision whether to use it. Some users even need to use a storage driver due to BIOS bugs (see RayeR's UltraDMA BTTR thread), at least when they want to use EMS. I think it is safe to assume that "open and license-safe" are good choices. Also it is safe to assume that "mimicks a MS DOS feature" is a good reason to be in BASE. However, I think this can be seen relaxed regarding drivers: If it mimicks a MS "DOS" 7 feature such as LFN, it is useful to people who know "DOS" as part of Windows. And if it is a driver for something that did not even exist when MS DOS existed, such as USB or DVD drives, it should also be BASE because using your hardware seems to be a basic thing for me. Of course I would not make camera drivers base, because MS DOS never shipped with video editing or chat software by default :-) Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=267308311&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
