Date:	Tue, 10 Jun 1997 12:53:56 +0200 (MET DST)
From:	Mark Habersack <grendel AT hoth DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl>
Reply-To:	grendel AT hoth DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl
To:	Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de
cc:	opendos-developer AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Anyone working on ext2 support for OpenDOS?
In-Reply-To:	<168ABD043E4@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de>
Message-ID:	<Pine.BSI.3.96.970610124741.24352A-100000@hoth.amu.edu.pl>
Organization:	PPP (Pesticide Powered Pumpkins)
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Matthias Paul wrote:

> > FDOS and add a native support for VFAT there. That would require much less
> > work on the FS part, but somebody would have to modify command.com and some
> > other parts of the kernel. I can do the FDOS part - who's gonna do the rest?
> > 
> > As to ext2fs support - let's use IFS, but we need some documentation. Anyone?
> 
> Hm, for the case you did not know yet, there is a little on IFS and 
> redirectors in "Undocumented DOS, 2nd edition", and Ralf Brown's 
> interrupt list also contains something on it.  However, I have yet to 
Yes, I've read it but it's much to vague to rely on it. We need precise docs.

> see a precise documentation of DOS-IFS (I will keep my eyes open).
> In some of the recent issues of the German computer magazine c't 
> there was an article on the OS/2 IFS layer and Windows95 LFNs, but 
> I think, it contained nothing interesting to you after you actually 
> wrote a VFAT TSR.  They mentioned some sources of free OS/2 IFS, maybe
> this could be interesting to you (including ext2fs I think).  I could 
> look up the URLs, if you need them.
Thanks to one of my net acquaintances I've got very precise material on Win95
IFS together with the source code, examples et al. Well, all's fine but it
seems that it won't move without the IFSMGR VxD. We could, however, use the
IFS specs as defined for Win95 and just copy the structures, calls etc - that
would however mean we're dropping DOS support, and that's not what we want. I
tried to figure the specs out from the OpenDOS sources, but they're real mess
and I really don't have enough time to dig through that... ;-(((
An alternative would be to use the DRIVER.SYS interface which is well
documented, but a little outdated - it would require many changes to allow for
easy FS support on DOS. Ideas?

> At present, I'm under heavy workload, so I cannot jump into it and 
> help you with COMMAND.COM.  Also, I would first like to bring 
> IBMDOS.COM to the update 15/2 level, which would cost me some more 
> weeks (if not months).  If you do any changes to IBMDOS sources, 
> could you please put them all in conditional defines, so that we can 
> synchronize them relatively easy with my sources after including the 
> U15/2 patches.
OK. I think it'd be better not to make any changes to the kernel until they're
patched to the latest version available.

> BTW, my updated IBMBIO.COM is running stable now (with OpenDOS 
> *and* Novell DOS since U10), and it actually contains *all* the 
> patches of NWDOS 7 U15/2 (huh, there were many...), including a 
> bunch of other fixes, optimizations, and enhancements, although 
> its some KBs smaller now...  Since I'm planning to add some 
> more stuff to it (if I find the time), I'm still holding it back 
> for the moment...
Excellent. Is it available for d/load somewhere in a easily accesible place?
;-) BTW.

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