Mail Archives: djgpp/2015/04/28/17:35:39
Am 28.04.2015 19:18, schrieb DJ Delorie:
> Ah, I see.
>
> I see no reason to not spin a 2.05 release just to get this out, but
> the only other issue we've had stopping this is the malloc one. IIRC
> the last concern I had with changing malloc was breaking the ABI, but
> if Juan and Andris can agree on what malloc "works" we'll just go with
> that and have something that can replace both 2.03 and 2.04.
I have been using the nmalloc patch posted by Andris in all my ports lately.
I have never experienced any difficulties with the binaries using that malloc
code. IIRC code compiled with it cannot be debuged, but Andris knows better.
I have never tried to understand the code, I have simply used it to test it
by using it. Fortunately I never had to debug memory issues so I never
experienced any difficulties using nmalloc.
Neitherless over the years I have experienced difficulties with binaries compiled
using libc compiled from cvs repository when used on plain DOS (aka MSDOS 6.22 and
FreeDOS). Unfortunately I have not documented them.
These issues become visible when I try to configure and compile some contemporary
GNU packages. This is not a LFN issue alone and cannot be solved by installing
such a driver. Of course LFN support is always required for such projects.
I think these are primarily issues related to the way the Windows file system
works and supports NTVDM.
To make the point clear, "djgpp 2.05" has always worked __very well__ for me when
used on NTVDM (aka WinXP) and on Win98SE but it had some issues when used on plain
DOS. I fear that the people who made a great job to get DJGPP working on Win2K
and WinXP around the year 2000 and later no longer had MSDOS machines to recheck
their code on plain DOS. For me that was never an issue, because I stoped using
MSDOS long long time ago and as long as djgpp worked flawlessly on NTVDM I was happy.
I have used djgpp to port GNU programs to DOS. Nowadays this is almost impossible
using plain DOS. Alone the time to uncompress a file like binutils-2.25.tar.bz2
becomes prohibitive when a LFN driver is installed. But LFN support is absolutely
necessary to configure and compile such a program. After having installed the source
code, trying to configure and compile it on plain DOS becomes a nightmare.
Not only because NTVDM is much faster than plain DOS but also because the used
programs (compiled with djgpp) behave differently on NTVDM and plain DOS.
IMHO a "djgpp 2.05" should be released because still a lot of people ask for it
and they do not want to check it out from cvs repository and compile it by their
own. But it should be clear that the DOS of today no longer is NTVDM but FreeDOS
and it behaves very differently from NTVDM. So we should be prepared for some
"bug" reports.
Regards,
Juan M. Guerrero
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