From: kroe AT sbcs DOT sunysb DOT edu (KiYun Roe)
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 92 13:12:39 EST
To: Kingsley Kerce <kerce AT xi DOT cs DOT fsu DOT edu>
Subject: Re: All this talk about fully-featured DJGPP
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Status: O

> Perhaps I'm
> missing something, but aren't the multitasking/signals/pipes ideas
> better left up to an operating system?

If you can afford another operating system and need the sort of
complete, sophisticated implementation of these services that an
operating system provides, then you should get OS/2 or Unix.  However,
there's a big difference in what I've proposed and a full-blown
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 enough reason for me.  MS-DOS and DJGPP are not just cheap
-- they're free (my system came with MS-DOS and would've cost the same
even if I had ordered MS-DOS deleted).

> 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 also using DJGPP for portability.  I've gotten used to the idea of
running MS-DOS at home. :-)  I also write software at both work and
school which expect to run under Unix.  I'm interested in adding
additional services to go32 so that I can run more of my programs at
home.  It seems that none of your programs call fork(), pipe(), or
popen(), but some of mine do; I also have written various utilities to
stick into pipelines, and I want real pipes to run them.  Other people
have expressed an interest in emacs and gdb.  The extensions that have
been proposed will go a long way towards making it possible to run
these under DOS almost the same way they run under UNIX.  I'm not so
interested in emacs, but gdb would be nice.

> 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?

You're kidding, right?  Either of these would require a much larger
commitment in time and resources.

It sounds to me like you'd rather have UNIX but can't afford it.  I'm
sorry about that.  I'm not devoted to UNIX, and I don't want to pay for
it or the new hard drive it would need.  OS/2 2.0 may serve my needs,
but it's not here now, and I don't know that when it arrives it will
run my collection of software enough better than MS-DOS and Windows to
justify switching.  For the time being I'm content to be a lowly DOS
user at home as long as I can use DJGPP for the programs that I also
run elsewhere.

Regards,
KiYun