Hi Bart,

> I was looking into merging parts of UNSTABLE a few months ago but
> it's a lot of work since I don't like about half of the changes.

Actually I think it might take man-months or more to review all
the MANY changes between unstable and stable, plus merge all the
fixes of stable into unstable first.

> or two on FreeDOS. There are funny space savings in text strings just
> so that Lucho could get the compressed kernel under 40K. I found one
> bug in the inittext.c optimizations by Arkady. And so on.

Space should not be everything. But for people who do care a lot
about space, it would be better to have several subsystems compile
time selectable, for example "any COUNTRY support at all, internal
or external" or "FCB support" and so on.

Many patches of UNSTABLE are indeed peephole optimizations which
can make the code very hard to read. Be glad you did not try to
debug CuteMouse, for example ;-). So one has to be very careful /
meticulous (?) / thorough / diligent when porting things from the
UNSTABLE kernel to the stable / svn trunk "branch".

> the BIOS int13 does not support any other size AFAIK

I think there were Japanese diskette formats with 1k sector size?
Probably not bootable, though. Same for optical WORM drives.

> External country.sys and more windows 3.x support never hurt.

Yes. Especially the int2f stuff should be reasonably easy to port.

> Removing the internal country table makes things a little bit more
> dependent (Tom's point of having the internal table is that you don't
> need a country.sys file if all you want is the correct date-month-year
> display). Of course the internal table is not good for the 40K aim.

I do like the internal table a lot and it UPXes well afaik but, as
said, one could make the internal table and support for external
country sys both a compile time option, including the option to
compile a kernel with neither of the two enabled.

In either case, there are still - few - unimplemented functions
which should be added to stable before we start adding tuning
stuff from unstable into stable if you ask me. Bugfixes from
unstable are welcome in stable, of course, esp if smallish.

Eric


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