Hi Jerome,
> Out of curiosity, what would your perfect solution to multi-language support > entail? > Everyone live with English, compile your own or something else entirely? the current solution is quite nice if you ask me: You can create a command.com in the language of your choice by concatenating a binary file and a message file into a command.com file, which can be done either by hand or as part of the install process. People can keep a small number of command.com files in their preferred languages and use a config sys menu to select the shell of their choice. Actually cutemouse supports a similar mechanism to have a compile/assembly time choice of ctmouse message languages :-) A number of non-driver apps support language specific messages in separate files, selected using environment variables. For those, you can keep all languages installed and switch more easily, but you could in theory have some tool which zips away all message files in unused languages to have less clutter in your freedos directory. By the way, the ability to select different shells in a config sys menu also gives the chance for a REALLY important shell variation: Those boot options which load no XMS/HMA drivers should make sure to load a KSSF or similar "disk swap" command.com, because the XMS swapping version will take away large amounts of RAM from the apps when you try to use them without XMS. The KSSF or KSWAP versions do not move themselves to XMS and back while apps are running, but they actually re-load command.com from disk as needed, letting apps overwrite the RAM instance of command.com apart from those parts which are necessary to maintain program state :-) In short, use kswap command.com if no HIMEM or JEMMEX is loaded, but use xmsswap command.com in all "normal" situations with XMS. Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
