[Freedos-devel] roadmap for freedos kernel 2038

[Eric A. <er...@co...>]

Hi everybody,

Tom just said in the "A Poll of sorts" thread on -devel:

> just kick out the useless 2037 kernel
> (merge any useful stuff into 2038); that's it

Unfortunately, 2037 has an immense amount of changes
and is based on 2035a. Still it would be interesting
if people could mention some examples of 2037-things
that would be useful for 2038 or 2039. Preferably
things which are of limited complexity, not something
like "remove fnode subsystem" :-).

I think we should release a stable 2038 kernel before
we start merging 2037 / unstable stuff into the main
stable/trunk 2039 kernel again... Check our Bugzilla
to see what is already fixed in SVN and what should
be fixed (soon!) for 2038. Current "major" items are:

1658 Ghost 5.1 fails: Needs somebody with Ghost 5.1 to fix
1842 HMA usage fails: sounds more like himem bugs
1862 SUBST/CHDIR errors: Fixed in SVN :-)
1908 REN needs a scratchpad dir entry: A patch is in bugzilla?
1956 extending JFT (FILES=...) fails: Fixed in SVN :-)
1959 FILES table is fragmented: usually this is what you want,
     but a config option "all in 1 low RAM chunk" might help...?

There are 20 normal, 2 minor and 12 enh bugzilla entries at
the moment. The latter could be moved to the sourceforge wish
(feature request) tracker, and one of them is already fixed
in SVN (another, the int13 boundary DMA helper, has a TSR
workaround available). The minor items are about the style of
initdisk partition error messages and "DJGPP RHIDE graphical
bugs, need a tester". Three of the normal items are, as far
as I can tell, fixed in SVN: 1793 DJGPP GREP vs RHIDE, 1854
Turbo C++ 3, and 1953 int 21.29 vs drive existence. Several
other normal items may in fact be fixed already but nobody
has tested that yet ;-).

It would be quite nice if we could do the REN fix and file
table fragmentation config thing, and finally find out why
Netware has problems. Then we should release an official 2038
FreeDOS kernel. Writing a nice changelog will be a considerable
part of the work for that. Let me know if you want to help :-)
We need: tester help, coder help and doc/changelog writer help.

Thanks! Eric