[Freedos-kernel] Re: Broken VERSION= in 2035 etc. - too many kernels

[Eric A. <eric@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE>]

Hi!

> If it is broke in stable and fixed in dev, then it should
> be fixed in head soon.  Please people, the kernels are not
> Lucho/Arkady vs Tom/..., they are stable and development (unstable).

Well I can only give people the Lucho or the SF homepage URL if
they want a kernel BINARY. If I understand right, we NOW have the
Tom and the CVS SF binaries online, too? Which SF binaries,
2035 plus stable plus dev? Or is stable the same as 2035?

And if I understand right, The CVS dev branch contains most
Lucho / Arkady patches? Are there patches which are rejected even
in dev, or does that mean that CVS dev is - after some delay - the
same as the kernel on Luchos homepage? And CVS stable is one kernel
which collects all useful/stable updates since 2035, similar to
Toms kernel but not the same? Any quick-to-describe differences
between Tom and Jeremy-CVS-dev?

> See history.txt in the docs directory.
Accesible through the CVS web viewer for the dev and stable branches?

> Also see http://www.fdos.org/kernel/head2unstable.diff if you are
> curious of the difference (minus new files) between stable & dev.

Nice idea, but that is 554394 lines (bzip2 compressed would be 115k)
in ONE file, pretty tricky to fetch a collection of patches from
that 16613 line (71622 words) file unless you know verrry well which
patches you want.

> I'm still reviewing the patches in the dev branch and merging into
> stable.  Any that make it in that others strongly disagree with can
> always be reverted...

Thanks a lot, that definitely takes a lot of your spare time.
You could put up an online feedback system where people can
download single patches and 'upload' comments (like a grade / degree
of confidence in 'does not introduce bugs' / 'improves kernel' /
'does not change semantics' (or does change them, fixing a bug) terms).
That would allow to split the work a bit.

Eric

PS: Interesting...
FreeDOS in the news http://www.windowsfordevices.com/articles/AT6292162763.html
SmallBasic QBASIC DJGPP: http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net/
(I think a DJGPP version is really fine, no need for an 8086 port...
if the SmallBasic people need help with some features, let me know...)


PPS: download ISO to C:\ so you end up with C:\FDBOOTCD.ISO file...
then the FreeDOS installer mounts it? Why on earth...? Why not just
COPY the files on the ISO to c:\temp, then boot some DOS and FreeCOM,
cdd c:\temp, start the installer there? If you are clever enough to
copy a whole ISO to a PC which cannot boot from CD, then you will be
even more happy about being able to copy the files - which is even
simpler than copying the ISO, if you have to use floppy or slow link
cables / network.