Date: Thu, 6 Feb 92 09:20:27 -0500
From: Kingsley Kerce <kerce AT xi DOT cs DOT fsu DOT edu>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: All this talk about fully-featured DJGPP
Status: O

Recent messages on this list, beginning with "why you shouldn't use
DJGPP", are promoting what I think is an overblown DJGPP.  Perhaps I'm
missing something, but aren't the multitasking/signals/pipes ideas
better left up to an operating system?  Granted, MS-DOS is garbage,
it's extremely popular, and it's the only OS that most people (myself
included) can afford, but that's not a good enough reason to hack some
386-based kludge on top of it to do the things that we want.

It's a good bet that most readers of this list and users of DJGPP are
hackers, or at least "power users", and they're running a
386/486-based PC/workstation.  I'd therefore bet that they desire a
better OS than MS-DOS, probably UNIX.  Perhaps many are in my
situation, as a student -- 386 PC at home running MS-DOS, UNIX
workstations at school.  My reasons for using DJGPP are mainly
portability; I can use gcc at home and school with a minimum of effort
in coding conditional compilations.

I'm grateful to Delorie and all who made DJGPP possible -- it's been a
lifesaver.  But is it not time for the excellent programmers involved
to concentrate their efforts on assisting in the development of a
desirable OS, for instance the GNU OS?  How about this 386 BSD whose
articles have appeared in Dr. Dobbs?  Why waste time hacking on top of
MS-DOS?!

If we can't wait for GNU OS, etc. then there must be some way to bring
the cost of the commercial UNIXes down far enough so that even a
student could afford one of them.  Isn't the demand for these UNIXes
high enough to bring the costs down?

Thanks for listening -- I'd like to hear others' opinions on this...

Kingsley Kerce			      kerce AT nu DOT cs DOT fsu DOT edu (Internet)
Dept of Computer Science B-173	Ph#s: T12-4p F8-4p (904)644-1233, 5436, or 8562
FSU, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-4019      Other times  (904)644-5476
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