From: Richard Dawe <rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: The Future of DJGPP
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 19:14:58 +0100
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Hello.

Damian Yerrick wrote:
> 
> Richard Dawe wrote:
> >* Support for FAT32 drives;
> 
> I already compile and run DJGPP programs on my Windows 98
> FAT32 partition on my laptop without problems.  What's new?

As Martin pointed out in another part of this thread, you'll only notice
the problems if you try to use FAT32's new limits.

> >* Symlink support;
> 
> How can this work?  I know DJGPP already supports symlinks to
> executables (a loader stub that says "load the COFF image from
> another file").  But DJGPP runs on DOS, which uses the FAT
> filesystem, which has no support for general symlinks.

The filesystem doesn't, but 'tis more cunning than that. The symlinks are
actually special format files (can't remember the format), which DJGPP's
libc understand. IIRC the format is similar/the same as Cygwin's symlinks,
but without the special file attributes.

This has been discussed extensively on the djgpp-workers mailing list.
That's probably the best place for some insight.

> >I haven't used it much under Windows NT, but I guess it works
> >better now there's a good LFN driver for NT.
> 
> Doesn't work on NT 5 (Windows 2000) which has an annoying limit of
> two nested DPMI programs (Make or RHIDE runs GCC but GCC can't run
> the preprocessor).  We may need a Win32 hosted DJGPP for this.

While Windows 2000 is descended from NT, it has a different name. IIRC
2000 has a built in LFN driver. As you say, it giveth with one hand (LFN)
and taketh with the other (nested exec). Maybe this problem will be
cracked one day?

Bye,

-- 
Richard Dawe
[ mailto:richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com | http://www.bigfoot.com/~richdawe/ ]