<Caution - long rant. Please be mindful about how you quote and comment so it doesn't turn into a jumbled mess>
The road map from the Wiki dated August 2010 seems to be wildly optimistic. It is talking about tightly integrated protected mode support, protected mode networking and USB, borrowing device driver code from other OSes, etc. I don't think that road map is feasible. Ever. Tightly integrated protected mode support basically leaves 8088 or 80286 class machines behind. Which seems fair given that those machines are 25 or more years old now but a big "market" for running any form of DOS is to support old hardware. So a new version of FreeDOS that does not work on that hardware limits its reach. (I suspect that those machines would be perfectly happy remaining frozen in time, running an earlier version of FreeDOS so this may not be a real issue for them.) Re: Protected mode USB. What does "protected mode" mean in this context - is the intent to run in protected mode all of the time, not just switch into protected mode when an application loads? I could see where protected mode device drivers for block storage and input devices would be very useful, but if they come and go as applications load and unload then that limits their utility. (Think of a DOS device driver for external storage on a USB drive ... would the drive letter be invisible at the DOS prompt because you are not in protected mode, and then be available to your application only if it runs in protected mode?) Re: Protected mode Networking. Every DOS application "brings its own" networking code. To take advantage of any new networking you would need to change the applications. The short story ... The DOS application ecosystem is pretty well frozen in time, about 20 years back. If you want to make an enhancement to FreeDOS generally usable by FreeDOS users then it has to pretty much work transparently with existing applications. Or start adding new applications. I don't think there is any point to adding new features to FreeDOS that older applications can not use. If you go down that path then you have to start modifying applications. Then you might as well decide on a new toolchain, other kernel upgrades that we need, etc. and then we are off on a new OS hobby project. We all know how successful those turn out. If we can add device drivers or code to the kernel that keep FreeDOS alive and well on modern hardware then we can keep enabling the applications that we already have. Even this might not be necessary; if hardware support becomes too much of a problem then falling back to emulation environments that run FreeDOS in a virtual machine might be the answer. (If you have a hard requirement that FreeDOS boots on bare hardware then this does not work for you.) We need users/developers/programmers ... I don't see the lack of advanced OS features as a threat to FreeDOS. I see adding them as the threat. Unless you are on older hardware Linux has everything you need, including a large developer base. There is no harm in providing a library that allows a new application to spin off a thread on an unused core, but that's quite different than trying to shoehorn threading or multiple CPU support into FreeDOS. I don't see the lack of hardware support on modern hardware as a big threat. Emulation and virtualization will protect us from lower level hardware changes for a long time to come. If anything we should be careful to ensure that VirtualBox, QEMU, etc. don't drop any features that we need to boot FreeDOS. (People who are required to use FreeDOS on bare metal will see this differently.) What I do see as a threat is the lack of people who know how to code under DOS, whether that be applications, TSRs, device drivers, etc. We are never going to get cutting edge software on DOS; those days are gone. But we need to attract more hobbyists, even if we have to disguise FreeDOS programming as another form of embedded programming. FreeDOS needs to embrace the retro-computing crowd; they have the hardware that needs things like FreeDOS and the spare time to play with it and push the limits. We need to clean up our documentation, improve our install and updating process, and generally do things that attract new users. With new users comes more hands, which we really need to keep things alive. We need to make incremental improvements to the FreeDOS distribution and do more frequent releases. Seeing FreeDOS 1.1 make it out was nice, but there was a few year gap there. If there is another 5 year gap between releases is anybody going to care about FreeDOS? My personal plans ... I'm trying to make network programming under DOS easier by providing a pretty complete framework for doing it. I've also picked my projects carefully to be both useful and to try to grab some attention to show that DOS, although not current, is still capable of some pretty neat things. The PCjr running a web server under IBM DOS 3.3 serving most of the content on brutman.com is a good example of this. It gets people thinking "Wow, DOS can do that? On that level of hardware?" At some point I'm going to tackle the kernel and get FreeDOS running on a PCjr. That will make FreeDOS appeal to at least three more people. ; - 0. There are plenty of things to do for programmers and non-programmers alike. Lets get to a more sensible roadmap (strategic), and then start defining the short term items (tactical) to support that roadmap. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
