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From: Rugxulo <rugxulo AT gmail DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: incompatible
Date: Sat, 19 May 2012 16:22:30 -0700 (PDT)
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Hi,

On May 19, 9:53 am, Hans-Bernhard Bröker <HBBroe DOT  DOT  DOT  AT t-online DOT de>
wrote:
> On 19.05.2012 14:22, Rod Pemberton wrote:
>
> > I was glossing over it ...  DJGPP needs a purpose.
>
> > I was noting that DJGPP could move on from DOS to Windows "console"-only
> > applications.
>
> As new purposes go, that one's way old.  MinGW and Cygwin don't really
> need re-inventing.

MinGW wasn't needed at all, it was originally just a fork of Cygwin
without the heavy DLL. I guess licenses and runtime issues affected
that. (BTW, I still hate the idea of them using MSVCRT.DLL.)

Cygwin? Why not just use MSVC or SFU? (See where I'm going with this?)

Besides, we already had this years ago with RSXNTDJ, but it wasn't
important because NTVDM (then still) mostly worked.

> > It would require a rewrite of the custom DOS C library DJGPP uses,
> > which could possibly be huge or not.
>
> In other words, it would require a rewrite of basically everything that
> makes it DJGPP.

A rewrite is unlikely to happen, though it wouldn't be the worst idea.
Others have rewritten themselves several times, so there's no reason
"we" can't either. It might make it better, who knows, but I agree
that it's probably not going to happen (lack of inertia, time, etc).

> > The last three times I tried Cygwin, it had a monstrous installer
> > that had to use Windows, etc.
>
> I think you might want to think again about whose work you're calling
> "monstrous" there.

IIRC, only the first version of that installer was written by DJ. And
we're only talking software here, not people, so there's no reason to
get defensive. If people can (constructively) criticize DOS, then
criticizing other software is fair game too.

Cygwin is indeed quite monstrous, it has a lot of files. I'm not sure
you can even install it manually. And it doesn't exactly hold back on
updating lots of stuff upon every chance it gets (full files, .bz2
compressed, AFAICT no binary diffs). Could be better, but I guess it
works well enough. Though it feels heavy and finding dependency errors
isn't hard.