Mail Archives: djgpp/2011/02/09/20:45:17
Hi,
On Feb 8, 2:20=A0pm, Eli Zaretskii <e DOT DOT DOT AT gnu DOT org> wrote:
> > From: "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_h DOT DOT DOT AT notreplytome DOT cmm>
> > Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 09:45:25 -0500
> > Bytes: 3360
>
> > For all practical purposes, DJGPP is dead. =A0It's frozen in time. =A0I=
t
> > tried to move to XP, sort of... =A0It hasn't, yet... =A0That's still in
> > Beta. =A07 years of Beta...
>
> I don't know what you are talking about. =A0DJGPP v2.03 works very well
> on XP, and is rock solid there. =A0I'm using it for the last 7 years to
> maintain the DJGPP port of Emacs. =A0There's no need whatsoever to go to
> the beta-quality v2.04 (which, I hear, is also much more stable than
> some release-quality packages out there).
(corrections welcome, obviously Eli knows 1000x more about this than I
do)
Only with patchlevel 2 (backported from 2.04?) did 2.03 (circa 2000)
become "stable" on Win2k/XP, thanks to CWS' workarounds (leaking
selectors?). And DJGPP still can't even pretend to be at the same
level of functionality as on Win9x. Various things broke, gfx support
is weaker, etc. But we grudgingly accept it because XP is more stable
(well, and we don't have much choice anyways, it's the popular OS. Or
was.)
Besides, Win9x won't barely run, if at all, on modern hardware and
isn't even half as well supported, in apps or drivers, as XP. Even
Win2k is too old for most developers. So those are even more difficult
options.
XP came out in (late?) 2001. Since this was the first NT version meant
for home users, they declared (stand-alone) DOS dead. SP2 came out in
2004 (luckily not "yet another" OS release). SP3 is about a year or so
old. MS calls XP "old" and "deprecated". They don't sell it on new
machines anymore. Clearly they aren't going to fix all our NTVDM woes.
XP Mode (via VPC) for Win 7 (Business, Enterprise, Ultimate only)
exists as optional download, but it's not meant (or allowed) for home
users. Sure, XP works "fairly" well for DJGPP, or at least better than
Win2k3, Vista, 7, 64-bit (nada), but that's not really saying much.
Oh, and VS2010's runtime doesn't even support older XP versions
anymore. Software developers barely still support XP, and obviously
testing/support for it is seriously waning (ahem, McAfee). In other
words, even if I (barely) like XP and it works, I can't rely on it
anymore. Extended support (or whatever) ends somewhere around 2014.
Then even XP will truly be dead. :-(
P.S. The changes in 2.04 were pretty much CWS' work (right??). He's
been too busy to finish it. Perhaps he will one day, but he will
probably need all our help. Better support for 4 GB files, better
memory management (??), symlinks, etc. I actually (barely) prefer it
and use it though admittedly 2.03p2 is "close enough" for most things.
Yeah, I'm not ready to give up on DJGPP yet. It's "good enough" for my
DOS needs. :-)
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