Hi, On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 1:46 PM Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net> wrote: > > Although there has not been a lot of feed back on what to do with the > excessively (nearly 1GB) BonusCD in T2210, I think the majority of feedback > has been in favor of splitting off the development packages from the BonusCD > on to their own DevelCD.
Yes, probably. I don't have it nearby to look, but a glance at this list ... * https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/group-devel.html ... shows a lot of DJGPP stuff. Now, I *love* DJGPP and all it does, but man, is it bloated! That alone takes up the most space, I think. We definitely *don't* need "full" DJGPP here. > And, we should do this instead of dropping packages for several reasons. The > main reason is for the convenience of users who may be on older hardware or > without network support. Those users might experience some difficulty getting > all of the programs they need into their “DOS” machine. Agreed, but you can't please everyone. It's not just DOS support or even "I want C" but dialects and various other minor features. > It has also been suggested to provide a “Developer Oriented” release of > FreeDOS. One that is specifically geared towards DOS development. I actually thought about making my own personal "floppy" for programming! So I know that's not quite what you wanted, but for me, it would be useful: * nasm16 + val, mawk, minised, picoc, P5 Pascal (pcom/pint), dx-forth, regina, dmake, etc. Bundled editor would probably be old SteVIe or e3-16 or even e14_edit. > So where does that leave us? I think there are at least two practical > solutions at present. > > First, split off all development related packages that are on the BonusCD > onto a new DevelCD. This would require very little work. The Release Build > Environment (RBE) is already capable of creating multiple extra package discs > images. However, I will probably want to add some functionality to use > specific labels for them. At present, it would generate BonusCD0 and > BonusCD1. It will not be hard to update the RBE to use custom labels for the > discs. This first solution implies we may eventually have a GamesCD, UtilsCD > and others as well. If we go down this path, perhaps we should start > separating some other packages on to their own media as well. DJGPP could have its own disk. (On my old hard drive, I had at least 1 GB used by DJGPP stuff.) You might also want to include DJGPP-derived things like Free Pascal and FreeBASIC. I mean, I've mentioned before that I made a single 1.44 MB floppy of an old DJGPP (2.03p2 with GCC 2.95.3 + BinUtils 2.16.1 + make 3.79) compressed by 7-Zip (so you only need the small 7zdec). That's C only and lacks C99 and newer GCC features and has no extra graphic or networking libs, but it's much smaller (and can fit on small a RAM disk). Newer GCC is *much* larger. > I don’t know if there is a good solution to this issue. But, I am certain we > can not provide a "950Mb BonusCD.” > > If you have any comments or other suggestions on the problem, please speak up. > > :-) Jerome, you're very smart and have done a ton for FreeDOS, so I trust whatever decision you make here. Don't stress too much over it. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
