At 10:21 PM 10/15/2005 -0700, Blair Campbell wrote:
Hi. I just thought that I'd start a topic before I left for two weeks
about a FreeDOS 1.0 release. It has been suggested that I release my
Beta 9 Enhanced Release distro as a FreeDOS 1.0 pre-release distro.
For one, this would mean that it would get tested more frequently,
also it would (possibly) encourage people to get the unfinished tools
done, or fix any bugs that unfinished tools have.
What does everybody think about this? Is FreeDOS almost ready for a
1.0 release?
Specific to HIMEM+EMM386, I do not think option-for-option MS-DOS
compatibility of EMM386 or HIMEM is necessary for FreeDOS 1.0 release, if
ever. People are comfortable with varying options for different drivers,
as witness the past huge popularity of memory managers like QEMM and 386^MAX.
For FreeDOS overall, many help and doc files really ought to be updated if
a clean 1.0 release is the goal. As I recall, a main developer on that
front took umbrage at the lack of appreciation for his work and moved to
ex-developer status.
However, I thought FreeDOS could have been released at 1.0 quite a while
ago. In comparison to most 1.0 software I have seen, FreeDOS does its
designated job as well or better. But given the (valid) reasons for
holding FreeDOS 1.0 to a higher standard, I'll say as far as EMM386, my
opinion is the VDS <-> SCSI interaction issue remains a possible 1.0 killer.
Those who have the ability to debug the VDS problem, don't get it, and
those who get the problem, aren't able to debug it. It is not universal to
SCSI drives, but apparently present in some common setups. I could turn
NOVDS option back to the default, but then there will be hard to track
complaints from a variety of users about all sorts of things not working
when loaded high, so you can't win.
Perhaps it would be possible to convince people to try NOVDS if they have a
SCSI drive and if their system fails at startup, but most people likely
would pay no attention and simply quit if it doesn't work. I saw this
attitude on a Usenet thread a few weeks ago: a person told someone to try
FreeDOS and he did, then indicated it gave him a startup error and he
bailed on it, end of story, no attempts to resolve the problem.
On the other hand, I have also seen Usenet posts where a person stated that
they would try FreeDOS "once it was out of beta test". So people also
aren't using FreeDOS because it doesn't have the magic 1.0 release number.
Frankly, I admit that I myself used to avoid beta-test software. But given
the vast number of open source projects which stubbornly refuse to use 1.0+
release numbers for software which is both useful and
reasonably-to-completely stable in most situations (NASM and Ethereal
spring to mind), I use so-called beta software a lot more nowadays.
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