Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Jim Hall]

Also: I'm also planning to do some general cleanup on the website. I'm
not happy with some changes I made when I made the last update to the
website earlier this year. I don't think these changes will be very
big, but you'll notice some changes. The biggest changes will be on
the "Download" page and the "Forums" page.

When I made the last update, I tried to make the "Download" page
easier to find the things you needed to download. That's why I broke
it up into those separate tables, and used the obvious "Download"
buttons.
--> I'm not sure that works very well, so I want to make it even
simpler. I might move some stuff to the front page ("Download FreeDOS!
Here are the options") and make separate pages that have more
information and specific download links for what you need to get. As
an example: to download the Fedora Linux distribution, the
https://getfedora.org/ website has two big info-boxes for
"Workstation" and "Server," each with a "learn more" link and a
"Download" button. I'm thinking about something like that.

For the "Forums" page, I plan to greatly simplify and focus this page.
See my other email that I just sent about that. Maybe I'll also use a
similar "info-box" approach to highlight the freedos-devel and
freedos-user email lists, and the *few* other forums that we want to
highlight ("DOS Ain't Dead", and the few others)

I might also move the social media links from the bottom (footer) of
the page to the top (header).

I'll set up the test site and try some things there before I push big
changes to the main website. But smaller, more obvious stuff (link
cleanup on the "Forums" page, etc) I can do now. "Big changes" means
things like the "info-box" idea, since that requires building out new
pages.


Jim


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Jim Hall]

Based on feedback here, I'll plan to do a few things to focus the
communication to fewer, more actively-used channels:

* I'll retire the freedos-kernel email list. (I'll make it read-only,
and not mention it on the "Forums" page.) All kernel development
discussion should go to freedos-devel.

* I'll retire the FreeDOS blog on Blogger, and migrate that content to
the FreeDOS website, probably under  or maybe
. I'm not sure which is better. I have some items
queued up for future publication (I try to "get ahead" when I can) so
I'll let those play out over the next few weeks while I figure out how
to best export the blog to the main website. I have blog posts
scheduled through the end of May, so I'll probably move the blog right
after those end (wait for the last item to go live, then export &
republish). Expect a news item about this in a few weeks when it
moves.

* I'll clean up the "Forums" page. I'll try to keep the forums we want
people to use marked with an obvious "Join" button. Others will be
just links, probably listed under an "other" category or something
like that. (For example, I'll probably have a line in there that says
"USENET was the original way we would communicate, before we moved to
email lists." And then just plain links to the USENET groups.)

* I'll start sharing more items from our Twitter feed as news items on
the website. Same for things that get announced on the Facebook group.
Not sure how to best do this. I'll try to balance between sharing
things and not overloading the news feed. There's no "rule" that sums
up perfectly how to do this, so I'll go with what seems to work well.
Let me know if I'm putting too much on the front page.
--> In general, that means I'll start sharing more items about "X has
started a new program/project that runs on FreeDOS." In the past, I've
tweeted the first announcement, then made news items on the website if
that person keeps making new releases (i.e. it's not a "one-off" that
then dies). Instead, I'll share more of those, and maybe the extra
attention will help the developer to get traction with other
developers.
--> For smaller items, I'll try to group them together into a sort of
"news of the week" item. Might not be weekly, but I'll try to keep it
timely.

* I'll also start posting occasional news items about the FreeDOS
channel on YouTube. For example: A few weeks after I started the
channel, I posted a news item about it, and shared links to the videos
I'd made by that point. I'll do something similar for new videos: I'll
spread out these news items by a few weeks, and post a news item to
remind (new?) website visitors about videos that have been posted over
the last few weeks.
--> I'll also make a similar news item about the "Writing FreeDOS
programs in C" video series. This is the "teach yourself to code"
video series that I mentioned earlier in this thread.


I'll start making these news items this week. I want to avoid posting
a whole ton of news items at once, so I'll spread out these news items
over this week.

Jim


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Bart Oldeman]

Hi Jeremy,

> At some point I may redo the kernel repository on GitHub, the current one was 
> initially from a released source and not git to svn conversation so is 
> missing history before that release.  Archiving current one and doing the git 
> <-> svn sync with a new one looses the link to existing forks on GitHub, but 
> as it is, the history is missing.  I'm open to suggestions.

The kernel repository already has the history since I pushed that 2.5
years ago but in a separate branch.. it's possible to use "git
replace" to link the two histories together.

it's here:
https://github.com/FDOS/kernel/commits/svn-trunk

The master branch goes back to Oct 14, 2012 with commit c4311571 and
that corresponds to d9225354 in the svn-trunk branch which ends at Feb
7, 2012 and goes back all the way to Jim's initial CVS commit on May
6, 2000.

Also having "FDOS / kernel: forked from PerditionC/fdkernel" is
confusing.. it should be the other way around. I'll try to figure out
how later.

> I don't usually respond, but I do read most of what goes on with FreeDOS.

I don't respond much any more either, but yes the sourceforge repos
aren't clear that development moved to github (all the freecom rc's I
have posted were on github, and announced as such, so I don't
understand why that was such a "secret"), which really happened around
2015 already. Although I was taking a complete break from freedos for
a while back, I think I came back a little in 2017. If I can still
change things on sourceforge I can make it more clear, otherwise I'll
ask (give instructions to) the people who can as I moved another
project from SF to github so know where to put it.

Bart


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[perditionc]

On Fri, May 15, 2020, 4:09 PM Robert Riebisch  wrote:

> Hi Jim,
>
> > Email


...
> > And we also have the Wiki for documentation and other information, and
> > the bug tracker on SourceForge to track bugs and feature requests.
>
> And we can't keep up with fixing things and updating items. :-/

...

I'm not sure who has permission to make changes to the wiki or bug reports
on sourceforge, I haven't had access to do more than comment in a long
while (and no I haven't yet asked for ability to do more).  So I know
several kernel bugs were fixed but bug reports not updated and I can't
update status of new bugs either.

The kernel and FreeCom sources on GitHub are where most recent patches from
others have came from.  There are several forks there as well that I try to
cherry pick fixes from.  The svn sources are still valid sources and will
be synced eventually, but it's easier for me to work with the GitHub hosted
repositories.  Also, with GitHub there is now fledgling testing that will
get run after updates and that testing will expand over time (much
initially based on dosemu tests).  Yes I know I have a big backlog of
updates pending and grand plans that I may yet one day complete.

http://kernel.fdos.org is my preferred website about the kernel.  It is
hosted as a GitHub page and updates are directly in sources.  Also
help.fdos.org is now hosted as a GitHub page as well (and still a version
behind IIRC).

At some point I may redo the kernel repository on GitHub, the current one
was initially from a released source and not git to svn conversation so is
missing history before that release.  Archiving current one and doing the
git <-> svn sync with a new one looses the link to existing forks on
GitHub, but as it is, the history is missing.  I'm open to suggestions.

I don't usually respond, but I do read most of what goes on with FreeDOS.

Jeremy
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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 15 May 2020, Robert Riebisch wrote:


IRC


I don't use it, but if I understand right, it's a quick way to post
questions w/o registering anywhere.


Yeah.  I've actually been running a small IRC network for over a decade, 
and maintain some of its infrastructure.


-uso.


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Robert Riebisch]

Hi Jim,

> Email lists
> 
> We obviously use the freedos-devel and freedos-user email lists.
> But the freedos-kernel list is not used very much. Looking at the
> archive, this hasn't seen more than a few emails per *year* in the
> last several years. What if we retired the freedos-kernel list and
> encouraged any kernel development discussion to happen on
> freedos-devel?

Yes, make freedos-kernel read-only after sending a retirement
announcement to it.
If needed later, it can be re-opened.

> Facebook
> 
> This is seeing a lot of discussion. I'd generally describe it as a
> place where people talk about how they are using FreeDOS.

So, we are "promoting" a FLOSS OS thru a vendor collecting private data ...
And the website is very slow on my 10-year old XP laptop.

I don't like Facebook, sorry.
If it works for others, keep it.

> Twitter
> 
> I use this pretty frequently, but usually to "broadcast" stuff
> happening in FreeDOS. I tweet out any news items here as an "ICYMI"
> (In Case You Missed It) and I share other FreeDOS-related news that
> isn't always something worth putting on the website. For example, I
> recently restarted the FreeDOS Blog, where I'm posting articles about
> the videos I'm recording for the FreeDOS YouTube channel. I share
> links to each blog item as I post them - but posting those links to
> the website as "news items" would be too much.
> 
> * I also share stories from people on Twitter, about FreeDOS. For
> example, someone will say they've used FreeDOS for this or that thing,
> and I'll retweet that.
> 
> * I also will tweet small news items from the FreeDOS Twitter account
> that I wouldn't usually post on the website. Generally, when someone
> announces a new project for FreeDOS (usually a game) I'll tweet about
> it. If they keep making releases and it's clear the project is
> actually going somewhere, that's when I'll make news items about it on
> the website.

No Twitter user.
Maybe you could integrate Twitter content to the FreeDOS home page?
And/Or make several News categories on the FreeDOS home page, so
visitors can filter for, e.g., "a new project for FreeDOS (usually a game)".
Why is there no freedos-announce or freedos-news mailing list?
Just thinking loud.

> YouTube
> 
> I started doing weekly videos about FreeDOS. These fall into 4 categories:
> 1. "Using FreeDOS" - showing off things from the FreeDOS distribution
> (as Robert described it, "FreeDOS in action")
> 2. "DOS applications" - demo'ing DOS programs running on FreeDOS
> (As-Easy-As spreadsheet, Word for DOS, etc.)
> 3. "Let's play" - demo'ing DOS games running on FreeDOS (mostly
> shareware and other proprietary games)
> 4. "FreeDOS programming" - this also includes a new video series I
> started for my Patreon, where I teach how to write FreeDOS programs in
> C
> *More info on that at https://www.freedos.org/c/
> 
> * There's some chat in the YouTube comments, but most of these are
> about the videos themselves.

Keep it.
Maybe others wish to contribute some videos?

> Blogger
> 
> I had been doing a lot of writing here until about a year ago. In
> March, I started posting articles based on the YouTube videos. I
> include more detail and background info than made it into the videos.

Instead put entries to the News category or tag "Blog" on freedos.org.
Or at least integrate showing the Blogger content on freedos.org.

> DOS Ain't Dead
> 
> This isn't a "FreeDOS" forum, but I follow it and re-post any
> interesting announcements on the FreeDOS Twitter, or the website,
> depending on topic.

Um, yes, my forum is about DOS in general, because there was no other,
when I started and FreeDOS mailing lists are limited to FreeDOS.
FreeDOS is welcome at DAD, of course.

By the way: Please adjust the link to 
I support and encourage using SSL, although no encryption also works.

> And some lesser used communication channels:
> 
> Slack
> I don't hang out there very often, and when I do I'm not seeing
> traffic or discussion there.

Then why bother?

> IRC
> Very rare that I go there. I just went there now and there are 42
> people logged in. So maybe this is getting used, and I don't see it
> because I'm not really there?

I don't use it, but if I understand right, it's a quick way to post
questions w/o registering anywhere.
There's no chat archive, right?

> USENET
> Not much traffic to alt.os.free-dos, but looks like there's still
> FreeDOS-related discussion on comp.os.msdos.programmer and
> comp.os.msdos.misc. I link to all of these on the website (on the
> Forums page) but maybe I shouldn't make them so prominent with the
> "Join" button?

I still like Usenet for its simplicity and low bandwidth usage.
(Using news.eternal-september.org 

Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Eric Auer]

Hi Jim, glad to hear from you about this :-)

> But mostly it's because I hadn't *removed* lesser-used communication
> channels from the website. So we have all these places linked from
> the "Forums" page, but some places are not very populated.

People already *on* the lesser-used channels are unlikely to
notice the new channels: See for example me who just notices
the extreme silence on the freedos-kernel mailing list or
you yourself who assumed the SF kernel sources are current,
while the github fork of Jeremy could be pushed via regular
reminders on SF and freedos-kernel, maybe even with little
blog style "cool things which happened in the github kernel"
quarterly news? ;-)

Or the example of my noticing a problem with directories-as-
disks in dosemu2: It turned out that 1. you now have to load
guest drivers for write access to work correctly and 2. The
dosemu2 people have given up on running classic FreeDOS and
only use their own heavily updated kernel and shell variants
and only test for bugs in those. Nice, automated tests :-)

> But the freedos-kernel list is not used very much. Looking at the
> archive, this hasn't seen more than a few emails per *year* in the
> last several years. What if we retired the freedos-kernel list and
> encouraged any kernel development discussion to happen on
> freedos-devel?

Sounds like a good idea, if Jeremy and any other kernel experts
have the time for such discussion? I think it would really help
to have more communication about what is going on, both because
it inspires devel and because it inspires and empowers users.

> https://www.facebook.com/groups/freedos/
> This is seeing a lot of discussion.

No idea, social media do not exist in my anti-social life ;-)
No instagram either. Luckily most youtube videos are accessible
without logging in to tell google who watched what when why.

> I'd generally describe it as a place where people talk about
> how they are using FreeDOS.

So basically it is a freedos-user to be used by those who like
websites which cannot be visited with DOS based browsers ;-)

> https://twitter.com/freedos_project>
> I use this pretty frequently, but usually to "broadcast" stuff

That makes sense, Twitter is for broadcasting small news bites.
I hope you also post the more interesting ones in some sort of
news section of the website as before?

> * I also will tweet small news items from the FreeDOS Twitter account
> that I wouldn't usually post on the website. Generally, when someone
> announces a new project for FreeDOS (usually a game) I'll tweet about

I MYSELF would be happy to read about all of those on freedos-user,
but I do not know whether others would feel flooded? I sometimes
forward announces discussed on BTTR to freedos-user myself, but I
skip the more exotic ones.

> https://www.youtube.com/freedosproject

Given the category description, it sounds like a nice channel for
more entertaining DOS lifestyle items.

> https://freedos-project.blogspot.com/
> I had been doing a lot of writing here...

What makes that better than a blog on freedos.org?

> DOS Ain't Dead
> 
> This isn't a "FreeDOS" forum, but I follow it and re-post any
> interesting announcements on the FreeDOS Twitter, or the website

See above ;-)

> And some lesser used communication channels:
> 
> Slack

Did not even know we had any...?

> IRC

I only remember the I7C one, but cannot even reach Tassilo
now! I would need to reach him to fix something, though...

Having 42 IRCers on your new DOS IRC sounds like not so few?

> USENET

Did not know that newsgroups have specific FreeDOS traffic,
assumed this to be a left-over from classic MS DOS times.

> And we also have the Wiki for documentation and other information, and
> the bug tracker on SourceForge to track bugs and feature requests.

In theory yes, but there seem to be zero reactions to reports :-(
At least that is what made dosemu2 abandon attempts to contact
the maintainers of classic FreeDOS components and just go fork.

Regards, Eric

PS: How about the two FreeCOM branches? And binaries, changelogs
and lists of known issues for Blair-LFN and classic separately?


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-devel]

On Friday, May 15, 2020 1:28 PM, Jim Hall jh...@freedos.org wrote:

> ...
> My comments/questions on a few ways we communicate:
> ...

My comments on your comments:  :D

> Email lists
> https://www.freedos.org/forums/
> We obviously use the freedos-devel and freedos-user email lists.
> But the freedos-kernel list is not used very much. Looking at the
> archive, this hasn't seen more than a few emails per year in the
> last several years. What if we retired the freedos-kernel list and
> encouraged any kernel development discussion to happen on
> freedos-devel?

Sounds like a great idea. They're both development-related, so why not?

> Facebook
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/freedos/
> This is seeing a lot of discussion. I'd generally describe it as a
> place where people talk about how they are using FreeDOS.

Even though I don't Facebook myself, it sounds like it's enjoying some success, 
and very well may be the channel with the largest potential audience. Keep it.

> Twitter
> https://twitter.com/freedos_project
> I use this pretty frequently, but usually to "broadcast" stuff
> happening in FreeDOS. I tweet out any news items here as an "ICYMI"
> (In Case You Missed It) and I share other FreeDOS-related news that
> isn't always something worth putting on the website. For example, I
> recently restarted the FreeDOS Blog, where I'm posting articles about
> the videos I'm recording for the FreeDOS YouTube channel. I share
> links to each blog item as I post them - but posting those links to
> the website as "news items" would be too much.
>
> - I also share stories from people on Twitter, about FreeDOS. For
> example, someone will say they've used FreeDOS for this or that thing,
> and I'll retweet that.
> - I also will tweet small news items from the FreeDOS Twitter account
> that I wouldn't usually post on the website. Generally, when someone
> announces a new project for FreeDOS (usually a game) I'll tweet about
> it. If they keep making releases and it's clear the project is
> actually going somewhere, that's when I'll make news items about it on
> the website.

It's a quick and handy way to get FreeDOS info out there. Keep it.

> YouTube
> https://www.youtube.com/freedosproject
> I started doing weekly videos about FreeDOS. These fall into 4 categories:
>
> - "Using FreeDOS" - showing off things from the FreeDOS distribution
> (as Robert described it, "FreeDOS in action")
> - "DOS applications" - demo'ing DOS programs running on FreeDOS
> (As-Easy-As spreadsheet, Word for DOS, etc.)
> - "Let's play" - demo'ing DOS games running on FreeDOS (mostly
> shareware and other proprietary games)
> - "FreeDOS programming" - this also includes a new video series I
> started for my Patreon, where I teach how to write FreeDOS programs in
> C
> *More info on that at https://www.freedos.org/c/
>
> - There's some chat in the YouTube comments, but most of these are
> about the videos themselves.

I've been enjoying it, myself. :) Keep it.

> Blogger
> https://freedos-project.blogspot.com/
> I had been doing a lot of writing here until about a year ago. In
> March, I started posting articles based on the YouTube videos. I
> include more detail and background info than made it into the videos.

Sounds like it's dead/dying, and we already have other platforms which offer 
similar functionality. Perhaps it could afford to be dropped?

> DOS Ain't Dead
> http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/index.php
> This isn't a "FreeDOS" forum, but I follow it and re-post any
> interesting announcements on the FreeDOS Twitter, or the website,
> depending on topic.

A classic! Keep (following) it.

> And some lesser used communication channels:
> Slack
> I don't hang out there very often, and when I do I'm not seeing
> traffic or discussion there.
>
> IRC
> Very rare that I go there. I just went there now and there are 42
> people logged in. So maybe this is getting used, and I don't see it
> because I'm not really there?
>
> USENET
> Not much traffic to alt.os.free-dos, but looks like there's still
> FreeDOS-related discussion on comp.os.msdos.programmer and
> comp.os.msdos.misc. I link to all of these on the website (on the
> Forums page) but maybe I shouldn't make them so prominent with the
> "Join" button?
>
> And we also have the Wiki for documentation and other information, and
> the bug tracker on SourceForge to track bugs and feature requests.
> ...

All of these may bear mention on the FreeDOS site, but don't need prime 
attention called to them. Differentiating these from the primary lines of 
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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Jim Hall]

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 8:50 PM Eric Auer  wrote:
[..]
> So, what to do? Some type of feature freeze? Maybe a
> roadmap of what stuff we want to port from fdpp to
> FreeDOS, or how to get fdpp to run on hardware? For
> that one would have to know which stuff fdpp improved
> but even that information is spread over zillions of
> interdependent patches of all sizes and hard to grasp.
>
> Maybe some of you have shorter and more productive
> ideas to what can be done here. I would be glad :-)
>

On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 7:00 AM Robert Riebisch  wrote:
[..]
> I try to summarize: Communication is the key.
> And I totally agree.
> FreeDOS communication is cluttered:
> - Mailing lists
> - IRC
> - Code, issues, PRs on GitHub
> - Bug Reports on SF.net
> - Facebook
> - Slack
> - Usenet newsgroups (Anyone even remembers alt.os.free-dos?)
> - Wiki ...
>


This is a very good point. We have a bunch of different ways for
people to communicate. Some of that is because I've been willing to
experiment with some new modes ("going where people are having
discussions") and some of that is because others have experimented
with new modes and I've adopted them (link to them) on the website.
But mostly it's because I hadn't *removed* lesser-used communication
channels from the website. So we have all these places linked from the
"Forums" page, but some places are not very populated.

My comments/questions on a few ways we communicate:

Email lists

We obviously use the freedos-devel and freedos-user email lists.
But the freedos-kernel list is not used very much. Looking at the
archive, this hasn't seen more than a few emails per *year* in the
last several years. What if we retired the freedos-kernel list and
encouraged any kernel development discussion to happen on
freedos-devel?


Facebook

This is seeing a lot of discussion. I'd generally describe it as a
place where people talk about how they are using FreeDOS.


Twitter

I use this pretty frequently, but usually to "broadcast" stuff
happening in FreeDOS. I tweet out any news items here as an "ICYMI"
(In Case You Missed It) and I share other FreeDOS-related news that
isn't always something worth putting on the website. For example, I
recently restarted the FreeDOS Blog, where I'm posting articles about
the videos I'm recording for the FreeDOS YouTube channel. I share
links to each blog item as I post them - but posting those links to
the website as "news items" would be too much.

* I also share stories from people on Twitter, about FreeDOS. For
example, someone will say they've used FreeDOS for this or that thing,
and I'll retweet that.

* I also will tweet small news items from the FreeDOS Twitter account
that I wouldn't usually post on the website. Generally, when someone
announces a new project for FreeDOS (usually a game) I'll tweet about
it. If they keep making releases and it's clear the project is
actually going somewhere, that's when I'll make news items about it on
the website.


YouTube

I started doing weekly videos about FreeDOS. These fall into 4 categories:
1. "Using FreeDOS" - showing off things from the FreeDOS distribution
(as Robert described it, "FreeDOS in action")
2. "DOS applications" - demo'ing DOS programs running on FreeDOS
(As-Easy-As spreadsheet, Word for DOS, etc.)
3. "Let's play" - demo'ing DOS games running on FreeDOS (mostly
shareware and other proprietary games)
4. "FreeDOS programming" - this also includes a new video series I
started for my Patreon, where I teach how to write FreeDOS programs in
C
*More info on that at https://www.freedos.org/c/

* There's some chat in the YouTube comments, but most of these are
about the videos themselves.


Blogger

I had been doing a lot of writing here until about a year ago. In
March, I started posting articles based on the YouTube videos. I
include more detail and background info than made it into the videos.


DOS Ain't Dead

This isn't a "FreeDOS" forum, but I follow it and re-post any
interesting announcements on the FreeDOS Twitter, or the website,
depending on topic.


And some lesser used communication channels:

Slack
I don't hang out there very often, and when I do I'm not seeing
traffic or discussion there.

IRC
Very rare that I go there. I just went there now and there are 42
people logged in. So maybe this is getting used, and I don't see it
because I'm not really there?

USENET
Not much traffic to alt.os.free-dos, but looks like there's still
FreeDOS-related discussion on comp.os.msdos.programmer and
comp.os.msdos.misc. I link to all of these on the website (on the
Forums page) but maybe I shouldn't make them so prominent with the
"Join" button?


And we also have the Wiki for documentation and other information, and
the bug tracker on SourceForge to track bugs 

Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Robert Riebisch]

Hi,

> this is completely new to me; was this ever discussed on the msiling
> list? I find this tremendosuly useful as it really eases the
> communication between virtual DOS machines and the host.

Bochs has the vvfat HDD mode, btw.

> you probably forgot the famous FreeDOS channel 
> https://www.youtube.com/freedosproject
> and a couple more ;)

Yes, I forget that. But the YT channel to show "FreeDOS in action" is
okay for me.

Cheers,
Robert
-- 
  +++ BTTR Software +++
 Home page: https://www.bttr-software.de/
DOS ain't dead: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Jim Hall]

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 8:50 PM Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>
> Hi Rugxulo (and Jim!)
>
> >> https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/ ...
>
> > AFAIK, the maintainer is Jeremy Davis, ...
> > https://github.com/PerditionC/fdkernel
>
> I hope there is sufficient advertisement of the github link, Jim?
>


It would, but it would be more helpful to give the actual link. The
page you point to says this:

"This fork is no longer the primary fork -- Please post PRs and issues
to https://github.com/FDOS/k… http://dosc.fdos.org/;

So if I follow the links, I eventually end up at https://github.com/FDOS/kernel


I'll update the FreeDOS website with that link.

There should be a few core FreeDOS packages that we should track on
the https://www.freedos.org/source/ page. The kernel is one. FreeCOM
is another. But I don't know where FreeCOM is being maintained
anymore. Can anyone share a link?

Jim


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[tom ehlert]

 https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/ ...
>> 
>>> AFAIK, the maintainer is Jeremy Davis, ...
>>> https://github.com/PerditionC/fdkernel
>> 
>> I hope there is sufficient advertisement of the github link, Jim?

> The latest commit to fdkernel points to , which
> says "This fork is no longer the primary fork -- Please post PRs and
> issues to https://github.com/FDOS/kernel !!!"

I wasn't aware of this  either. now to the
interesting part: at the bottom is a link
   fdkernel is maintained by PerditionC https://github.com/PerditionC

following this link  I find

"vbxmount

a DOS network redirector to allow access to VirtualBox's shared
folders as a normal drive. Fork of Eduardo Casino's vbsmount."

this is completely new to me; was this ever discussed on the msiling
list? I find this tremendosuly useful as it really eases the
communication between virtual DOS machines and the host.

why was this never advertised?

>> That is exactly the reasoning which does not work. Basically
>> Jeremy and maybe 1 or 2 others tinker away on github, Stas
>> and some others tinker away on dosemu2 and the fdpp "kernel"
>> in Linux space, making the same observation as me that the
>> kernel mailing list ist dead and nobody comments bug reports
>> so they conclude that FreeDOS is dead and their team neither
>> has motivation nor time to backport many fixes to FreeDOS.

> [snip]

> I try to summarize: Communication is the key.
> And I totally agree.
> FreeDOS communication is cluttered:
> - Mailing lists
> - IRC
> - Code, issues, PRs on GitHub
> - Bug Reports on SF.net
> - Facebook
> - Slack
> - Usenet newsgroups (Anyone even remembers alt.os.free-dos?)
> - Wiki ...

you probably forgot the famous FreeDOS channel 
https://www.youtube.com/freedosproject
and a couple more ;)

+1

Tom




> Cheers,
> Robert



Hallo Herr developers.,




Mit freundlichen Grüßen / with kind regards
Tom Ehlert
+49-241-79886



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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Robert Riebisch]

Hi Eric,

>>> https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/ ...
> 
>> AFAIK, the maintainer is Jeremy Davis, ...
>> https://github.com/PerditionC/fdkernel
> 
> I hope there is sufficient advertisement of the github link, Jim?

The latest commit to fdkernel points to , which
says "This fork is no longer the primary fork -- Please post PRs and
issues to https://github.com/FDOS/kernel !!!"

> That is exactly the reasoning which does not work. Basically
> Jeremy and maybe 1 or 2 others tinker away on github, Stas
> and some others tinker away on dosemu2 and the fdpp "kernel"
> in Linux space, making the same observation as me that the
> kernel mailing list ist dead and nobody comments bug reports
> so they conclude that FreeDOS is dead and their team neither
> has motivation nor time to backport many fixes to FreeDOS.

[snip]

I try to summarize: Communication is the key.
And I totally agree.
FreeDOS communication is cluttered:
- Mailing lists
- IRC
- Code, issues, PRs on GitHub
- Bug Reports on SF.net
- Facebook
- Slack
- Usenet newsgroups (Anyone even remembers alt.os.free-dos?)
- Wiki ...

Cheers,
Robert
-- 
  +++ BTTR Software +++
 Home page: https://www.bttr-software.de/
DOS ain't dead: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/


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Re: [Freedos-devel] stuck / forked freedos core component development!

[Eric Auer]

Hi Rugxulo (and Jim!)

>> https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/ ...

> AFAIK, the maintainer is Jeremy Davis, ...
> https://github.com/PerditionC/fdkernel

I hope there is sufficient advertisement of the github link, Jim?

>>> Is kernel development officially dead? How about freecom?
>> not officially. just as a matter of fact.
> It can ... be restarted if anyone is interested in doing the work

That is exactly the reasoning which does not work. Basically
Jeremy and maybe 1 or 2 others tinker away on github, Stas
and some others tinker away on dosemu2 and the fdpp "kernel"
in Linux space, making the same observation as me that the
kernel mailing list ist dead and nobody comments bug reports
so they conclude that FreeDOS is dead and their team neither
has motivation nor time to backport many fixes to FreeDOS.

Who knows what Jeremy is up to on the FreeDOS side, but he
apparently ALSO thinks that nobody else cares. Which means
nobody can look in his head and there can be no inspiring
discussions about his work or, you never know, about OTHER
people contributing some thoughts or even code... I do miss
the times when such discussions were alive, although there
must be far less than 1000 kernel code lines modified by me.

Now if you ask me what can we do to regain inspiration:

Well the seemingly obvious "test and improve stuff using
dosemu2" does not work: For anything broken in FreeDOS,
they have patches in fdpp and simply recommend to NOT use
classic native FreeDOS in dosemu2 because it is too old
and stuck with too many bugs. But for anything improved
in fdpp, you have to dig though 100s of patches because
fdpp is a constantly moving entity with little grouping
of changes by which, whether and why might be of backport
value for classic FreeDOS.

It is a bit like back in 2004 when Tom had his own fork
of FreeDOS 2035c with 3000 lines of changelog summaries
and even more code changes to look through and cherry
pick for merging back to the main branch. But this was
so long ago that I may totally misremember the context.

In any case, I vaguely remember large forks happening
before, but the distance between fdpp and classic must
be huge by now. Just saying "whatever, fdpp probably
is cool and porting it back to run on hardware instead
of dosemu2 must be easier than cherry picking all the
goodies back into the classic kernel" reminds me of yet
another problem:

This very thread suggests that most newer versions of
FreeCOM broke other stuff when adding LFN support for
long file names the user base apparently split into
those taking the risk and others preferring crash free
DOS life. Neither of the groups being large enough to
support maintenance of either of the branches with the
necessary testing, feedback, maybe code reviews etc.

I am sure Tom will remind me that my worries are just
idle ponderings and I should rather code something,
but that, too, worries me! Because we would end up
with the occasional DOS person coding something alone
for a while and then letting the code pick up dust
again until then next person feels lucky. While it
could be better than nobody coding at all, it does
not feel like a sensible solution to the structural
problem to me. Not that I would know one, alas...

So, what to do? Some type of feature freeze? Maybe a
roadmap of what stuff we want to port from fdpp to
FreeDOS, or how to get fdpp to run on hardware? For
that one would have to know which stuff fdpp improved
but even that information is spread over zillions of
interdependent patches of all sizes and hard to grasp.

Maybe some of you have shorter and more productive
ideas to what can be done here. I would be glad :-)

Regards, Eric



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