Message-ID: <3417DC6B.62CF@bo.dada.it>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 13:56:27 +0200
From: Diego Zuccato <dz AT bo DOT dada DOT it>
Organization: CyberSpace Software Labs BBS
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com>
CC: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: fread slowstart
References: <199709110105 DOT VAA23739 AT delorie DOT com>
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DJ Delorie wrote:

> It would be reasonable for the first stub loaded to allocate 64k or
> more of dos memory,
64K should be enough. (Uh, deja-vu :-) ) And it shouldn't too hard to
modify startup code to save it to flat memory on startup and restore it
when exiting main() or when a fatal error (Exception 13 or similars)
occours.

> and store the DOS pointer somewhere (say, an unused interrupt
> vector?).
Maybe one of those 'reserved' for ROM BASIC ? :-)

> Heck, we've still got 32 bytes of space in the stub!  Plenty for this.
Uh, since different stub releases are often incompatible and utilities
themselves could create troubles (eg using 2.00 bins mixed with 2.02
bins), why not use 2 of those 32 bits for a 'release' magic number ?
So, when installing a new package (eg make) that needs to call other
executables, it could check that version number to be sure that no known
troubles will arise.