Mail Archives: djgpp/2019/02/05/13:30:10
Hi,
On Sunday, February 3, 2019 at 1:14:14 AM UTC-6, Juan Manuel Guerrero (juan DOT guerrero AT hates DOT spam) [via djgpp-announce AT spam DOT sux] wrote:
>
> This is a port of GNU diffutils version 3.7 to MSDOS/DJGPP.
>
> DJGPP specific changes.
> =======================
>
> - The most notable change of the FSF distribution is that the DJGPP support
> has beeen dropped in favour of cygwin and MinGW support.
I don't understand this. I mean, I do (mostly), but it's still strange.
I was unaware that it was "officially" supported at all. I don't blame you
(or anyone) if you don't have free time. Maybe something changed there,
dunno. Not a big deal, but overall it seems pointless to omit support
upstream for a working port. But I wasn't aware they ever cared
in recent years. (In fairness, I guess they have bigger fish to fry.)
Cygwin and MinGW are still GCC's Tier Two while DJGPP is not (unfortunately).
They are more popular and thus get more contributors, so I understand.
Still, I'm biased towards DJGPP (and FreeDOS)!
> - All other changes are those required to get gnulib sources compiled with
> djgpp and are not user visible.
Now this I understand because Gnulib is very kludgy and POSIX-heavy, so
it hasn't supported DJGPP (or Win9x or OS/2 or ...) in many years.
Call me crazy, but perhaps POSIX isn't the portable utopia we'd all like?
Maybe we should stop targeting POSIX like it's some panacea to all the
world's problems? (Sigh.)
> - The port has been configured and compiled on WinXP SP3 and Win98SE using
> gcc710b and bnu228b. There is no guarantee that this may be possible with
> any other DOS-like OS. Due to the massive use of long file names it will
> not be possible to configure and compile without LFN support.
Besides the obvious fact that Bash usually doesn't work well under raw DOS,
thus "configure" won't really behave, LFNs are also a pain. Although you
can get LFNs working in DOS, it's quite slow. Honestly, I prefer avoiding
LFNs, but nobody else seems to sympathize.
We probably need to finally add full LFN support into the FreeDOS kernel.
(By "we" I mean some brave soul with the time and experience. But we
all have too many side projects, so this is wishful thinking. I'm still
worried about the recent kernel and shell ports, which are unfinished.)
Not that it matters, but I have not had time or energy to keep working
much on my MetaDOS. I enjoyed trying to rebuild things there, and I
usually tried hard to avoid LFNs. I would (in theory) be very
interested in bootstrapping or rebuilding various things, including
many parts of DJGPP. But that is somewhat unlikely these days, and
few others seem to sympathize anyways.
> Send Diffutils specific bug reports to <bug-diffutils AT no DOT spam>.
> Send suggestions and bug reports concerning the DJGPP port
> to comp.os.msdos.djgpp or <djgpp AT spam DOT sux>.
>
> Enjoy.
Thanks again for your efforts. I may not do anything brilliant with
such tools, but they are definitely useful (and fun).
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