Hi Jim,
I think there is still so much to do on FreeDOS itself that you should work a little slower with updates and new version numbers.
Some examples:
a) have a look at the bug list, e.g. xdel (reported by you), edit (reported by me has several bugs), fdisk
(reported by me: sizes for a primary size > 1000 MB cannot be entered as a value), fd antivirus (only works with a 10 years old virus definition - and only under special circumstances), backup/restore was announced but is not yet available, scandisk (if I remember right it is scandisk) is only an empty window where nothing
works) and others. There are more but I do not remember at the moment.
b) have a look at the different readme files and you will see a lot of "still to do", "plans for the future" etc.
I think all this (or at least the biggest part) should be fixed before updating to a new version.
If it is not done now, it will never be done.
c) in about 50 percent of the external commands have NO NLS support, so it is not "a system from a single source".
Means: First of all you need some programmers that fix all this.
d) With some programs it is extremely hard to translate them as a translator you have no feeling for the end result
which has the effect of ugly line breaks, bad translations because the variable is set at the wrong position etc.
Do you have any idea how long we worked to make the text for setup GUI looking fine? And we only fixed the
messages that appear permanently!
e) the help files have to be updated and translated into different languages (oldest parts are from 2007), additional links and better examples have to be added, it has to be checked which commands can be removed (e.g. backup/restore are empty - and a lot of others) or have to be added, this is a job that cannot be done within a few weeks / months.
And first of all it is necessary to decide how to write the help, htmlhelp is buggy and amb uses an absolute different version for creating the files with utf8 and reformatting them to the correct cp. And at the moment I know no solution how to reformat it to html and how to check if all links work fine (for html there is a simple tool).
Ok, so much about this.
As FD 1.3 now has an internet support, why not simply make updates / changes like in Linux with wget and fdimples?
The Linux group offers bugfixes etc. every week, but it lasts long till a new version comes out.
Why not doing the same basic thing?
With an updated fdimples and wget (which also supports no NLS in FD) it would be possible to find and add new games / files / tools / whatever
from a server - and Jim has the chance to announce it whenever they appear. So people do not look every day with fdimples but get updates
whenever there is a new tool available. AND: the number of downloads stays high!
In case that an online update at FD does not work for any reason, it could be downloaded not from the vm but from Win / Linux / whatever and
inserted into the FD vm (e.g. Windows can mount vhd files, imdisk supports more filesystems, Linux has a solution, forgot the name, I am sure there is also a tool to mount a vhd etc with Mac).
OK, that had to be said. Now you can attacke me.
Willi
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