Mail Archives: opendos/1997/05/12/16:11:59
On Fri, 02 May 1997, Gene Buckle replied to me:
Sorry for the long delay, I've been absent for a week.
> Matthias, Caldera _thought_ Novell had given them the latest source tree
> until I pointed out to Roger that what they had was totally unpatched
> code. To say the least he was very pissed. I don't know yet if Novell
> has supplied Caldera with the new sources. This is just one of many
> things that Novell has pulled on Caldera during this process.
;-(((
Rumours were, that unfortunately the project got completely out of
organization during 1995 (although some people still must have been
working heavily on NWDOS during this time). The patch sources might
not be in the source control system but in other backups. Maybe
someone of the former NWDOS developers at Novell having personal
backups??? Please, please, please could all the Ex-Novell people
from Caldera contact other (Ex-)Novell people that have been
working on NWDOS during 1995 to track down where the patch sources
are left. IMHO, we definately need them for the progress of OpenDOS,
at least for the kernel, the resident system extensions, and the
memory managers. We don't have the time to rewrite a full year's
work from scratch. By now, we should have been at a point, where to
look in the future, but at present we're bound to loose time in some
kind of 'idle cycles', searching for the necessary remaining patches.
The work has already been done, why should we have to do it once
again... (I can see Billy ROTFLHAO...) ;-(
> You might want to see if you can get it to build with NASM in Intel mode.
> If memory serves, NASM will generate 16 bit code.
Yes, but I first meant optimizations by e.g. reducing redundancy
in the IBMBIO.COM code.
> > COMMAND.COM. But, to get a stable OpenDOS working, if in the
> > meantime someone else was willing to take this necessary job
> > for COMMAND.COM or IBMDOS.COM, we could have it sooner and I
> > would be glad...
> I've been unable to find details referring to those patch revisions.
> If you can make the info for each fix available I'm sure you'll
> get a lot of help.
I really would like to provide this info, but all I have are the
HISTORY logs, the update binaries, a fair understanding of DOS
internals, tools like IDA, SOURCER, DEBUG, and FC, two hands and
a brain, but I would need a day having 48 hours...
This way, finally we could hack out the patches for all binaries that
have been written in assembler, but it is even more complicated (if
not impossible) to do this for files, written in higher languages
such as C. Someone knowing of a DOS text-editor with some kind of
auto-sync/lock feature when comparing two source code files in
different windows (not only that scroll-lock feature of TSE)?
Also should be capable of handling filesizes of 500 KB and more...
Matthias
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