Hi, Tom, I know this was not a great bug report. In fact, I wasn't trying to be too specific, just mentioning that some random and confusing stuff was happening. I didn't have time to isolate it yet. It was just a warning that things weren't quite perfect yet. (But I appreciate your work, Bart.)
MetaDOS 0.6 was the last stable release from last November. We've mentioned it here before. Honestly, despite that, I'm surprised you found it. I don't demand you dig through it, Tom. I know it's brittle, complicated, and messy. It's not perfect. I tried to keep it (relatively) simple, that's why it uses .BAT so heavily (which is neither great nor powerful syntax, but we have to make do with what we're given). The whole downloading stuff is to keep it small, to not include things that most don't need. I figured bandwidth was cheap enough to waste. Certainly downloading a few small things repeatedly is better than always forcibly (once) downloading hundreds of megs, right? (.VHD can hold more than floppy, but I did actually test this on real hardware, barely, many months ago. Bootable USB also works, ironically using PLoP on floppy to boot on that old P4.) BTW, some software isn't quite Free/libre (argh!), so I can't mirror it all to iBiblio for us. So some obscure parts are forcibly relegated to being downloaded from random websites. Not ideal. But some problems aren't on my end, so some things break (externally), so it's not even as good as it was months ago! (e.g. our old Wget [2008] stopped working on Github and SF.net. They changed.) This is why I'm still working on (unreleased) 0.7. (Kludge fix: NEWWGET.BAT inside STUBS.ZIP. The old .EXE [1.11] could be recompressed [UPX/LZMA] to barely fit on floppy, but the new one [1.19?] is way too big, so that's hopeless.) But I don't think any new bugs are exposed by this new 0.7 version. And I haven't come anywhere near to fixing everything yet. For instance, DJGPP /current/ only supports one BinUtils release these days, so when they update it, they delete the older .ZIP entirely. (This may be to save space on mirrors. It's still under /deleted/, apparently. But why would I actively use an old linker if I don't have to??) So that breaks some URLs. The text file is easily fixed, but now the checksums of resulting .EXEs are different (for whatever reason, presumably just padding, not some bug, since I see no functional difference). So that's confusing and counter-intuitive to reproducible builds (tests). Sigh. So I haven't even finalized 0.7 yet, and it hasn't seen any major improvement (although I forget some details). There's not much to it, but I need to double-check. In particular, the sources are 100% unchanged since 0.6, despite having the wrong, old subdir prefix. I haven't even completed my "todo" list yet. I uploaded my WIP snapshot to DropBox, if you direly want to test it. Again, not too much has changed, so I doubt it makes much of a difference (besides some broken URLs and wrong checksums from newer linker). Of course I guess I could "maybe" just upload this to iBiblio, but I'd hate to mirror something so unfinished. * https://www.dropbox.com/s/6whjgmb9xhdgw29/metados-0.7.zip?dl=0 (And yes, I meant startup time was faster (oddly) using the OpenWatcom build.) Sorry for the ramble, too many confusing details. On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 7:40 AM Tom Ehlert <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> Thanks for your efforts, of course, but ... it's still got some > >> bugs. The Watcom build runs faster (oddly), > > > could you please enlighten the rest of the universe in what way you > > determined that 'The Watcom build runs faster' > > ok, I enlightened myself, downloaded > > https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/metados-0.6.zip > > unpacked it, and made METADOS.IMG the start diskette of a virtual box. > > and this behaves indeed strange and complicated. > > METADOS is an example of batch processing, unzipping stuff to RAM disk, > unzipping further, and rather difficult to debug indeed :<< > ... > indeed strange things are happening. > just to notify everybody else that I will try to narrow down this better ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
