Hi all, Arkady: PLEASE do make FreeDOS 2035a behave as "wrong" as 2035, because people will want to compare 2035a to 2035, and if things happen like
- you cannot format unformatted drives (disk access flag broken) - stable version of FreeCOM (0.82pl3, as opposed to 0.82pl3xyz testing) crashes if you try to use F5 at startup then it is very hard to get the motivation to do experiments with 2035a. If you insist on cloning MS behaviour for F5: You can add a SYS CONFIG variable temporarily, which has to default to FREEDOS behaviour. Then those people which NEED the MS behaviour (do they exist? Why is it needed?) can still enable that mode, whil other people will simply be able to use 2035a as a replacement for 2035 and check if things get better by that. I am sure 2035a fixes several bugs of 2035, but please tell us in great detail which of your many patches actually fix bugs, and which! Most of your patches contain improved comments and small optimizations. If one such patch also fixes a BUG, it is usually very hard to notice, especially if your patch is very LONG but your comment is very SHORT. Your patch announcement mails often contain at most 5 lines of explanation each, if at all. Another thing which would be really GOOD to have: Please let Lucho put all patches online, either separately or in one ZIP/RAR/TGZ/..., along with a SEPARATE text file which tells for every single patch file - when you sent it to freedos-kernel / what the file date is - whether and which bugs it fixes - whether it contains comment improvements - whether it contains optimizations and whether those have been tested to be 100% compatible with the old implementation Thanks a lot! That should allow Jeremy and Tom to use more of your patches for the STABLE branch of the kernel, and it should allow people who are interested in the DEVEL / cutting edge branch of the kernel to quickly find the corresponding patch if they find a bug. Example: I found that the changed dsk.c or something related to it no longer honours the "disk access flag", so it is impossible to format disks which do not already have a valid boot sector now. Because it is too hard to find out which patches affected dsk.c in what way, I would probably simply replace the WHOLE dsk.c - or even the whole kernel if I would have been able to pinpoint the problem to "probably dsk.c" - by the classic 2035 version again, just to get FORMAT working again. If, however, it is documented which patch does what, and if the patches are somehow available for easier download than digging deep in my mail archives, then I can REVERSE APPLY single patches until I find the one patch which broke format for me. This will also make it easier for you and me to repair things, and will indirectly improve acceptance of your patches for the STABLE kernel. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=4721&alloc_id=10040&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-kernel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-kernel
