Hi Christian,
> I don't want to change everything. The only extension I asked
> for was to support FAT+, of course in the "stable" (or "trunk") kernel
> branch because "unstable" isn't developed by anyone currently and
> developing it would proceed the forking of these branches.
Still no reason to add experimental things to stable now :-)
The solution is easy: Add it to the UNSTABLE fork and, while
doing so, show that there are people who are interested in
new experiments with DOS! This will also draw more attention
to this branch and make it more likely that "safe goodies"
can be found in there and ported to stable and that on the
other hand UNSTABLE will finally get updated with some of
the fixes that stable received in the last few years... :-)
> As Udo (Kuhnt, from EDR-DOS) put it, the "unstable" branch was and is seen
> only as testing area for features that won't be added to the "stable"
I disagree on this. There is way too little review on UNSTABLE
but if you read the changelog and tech changelog, you see that
also normal useful but complex features such as COUNTRY SYS
support found a testing ground in the unstable branch :-). The
next challenge is to review / proofread the better few of those
features and add them to stable as well after that. Carefully.
> At least I didn't yet see anything changed in
> "stable" which was derived from "unstable"
Actually not much apart from COUNTRY SYS support in unstable
has very favorable "risk/complexity versus gain in features"
ratio at the moment, unfortunately...
>, and improvements of "stable" aren't added to "unstable" either.
This is because more or less the only developers were Jeremy,
Lucho and Arkady - the latter is kind of missing and Jeremy
just returned a few weeks ago from being so busy with the real
world real life that he simply had no time to continue working
on the unstable branch. Lucho now has other big things as 4DOS.
> Effectively "unstable" is forked off. Recent efforts to add some features
> of "unstable" back to "stable" (such as COUNTRY.SYS loading) support this:
> If the branches were maintained together, or even created from the same
> source with IFDEFs, it won't need much effort to add features from the
> testing branch to the official one.
If they were IFDEFed then you would have no chance understanding
either ;-). The stable / unstable diff is maybe 1000s of lines.
> Notice that I started working on a different DOS kernel (RxDOS) because I
> prefer to write such programs in Assembler. In a way, I want to "change
> everything" compared to DOS-C ("The FreeDOS Kernel") which is written in a
> high-level language, and that's the reason I choose not to develop it.
Tastes differ. One of the original goals with DOS-C was using more C :-)
> Although I'm not exactly interested in developing most of the FreeDOS
> programs, I did already point out a few bugs. I'm of course not fixing
> them myself (well, at most providing small patches) because I'm in no
> position to take over development of these programs.
Still you are welcome to point out tech details of bugs if you find
them, as we often have only vague "it somehow does not work" type
bug reports and no time or hardware/software to reproduce/debug them.
Eric
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