re: Commercial use of FreeDOS / BETA status and missing features

Howdy, I'm new to this list, but decided to chime in on this

On Fri, 2002-11-08 at 17:40, Eric Auer wrote:
>   need a 386 CPU and must not use the FreeDOS EMS driver). The FreeCOM
>   command.com shell does not see long file names, though.

Personal opinion is FreeCOM does not need to have LFN support ... even
DOS under Win 9x does not support this and names with spaces would break
batch files.

> - SCANDISK is not that important, as only more recent MS DOS versions have it.
>   However, we should have CHKDSK (difference: Scandisk has a nice user inter-
>   face...). This is currently being worked on, as we know :-).

CHKDSK is needed, preferably with fat32 support, fdisk & format need to
have fat32 support also.

> - Suggestion: Make an ALIAS for DIR in autoexec.bat, which points to a BATCH
>   file that "translates" the /On (etc.) arguments to DRL syntax and calls DRL.
>   DRL output differs from DIR output. Hm. Sigh. Depends on why and for what
>   you need DIR /O.. and DIR /A..! I recommend that FreeCOM should get the /A
>   soon and that somebody should take DRL and make a spin-off version that uses
>   the same arguments and output format as DIR (so: remove color from DRL and
>   make /O always on, forcing DRL to write to standard output) of MS DOS.

I have some batch files that are dependent on the formatting and command
line switches of DIR, you need to have a replacement that is drop-in. So
I would agree with this from a "users" point of view.
 
>   However, we should at least wait for an EMM386 with VCPI (what makes it DPMI
>   compatible: Then we have UMB, EMS and DPMI all at the same time) and better
>   versions of CHKDSK (and have some bugs like the FDISK/FAT32 one fixed) etc.
>   before we leave BETA status.

DPMI support would be very nice, I would like to see this in a 1.0, but
I remember that DOS 5.0 & 6.22 does not have this feature, that is why
at work we used QEMM.

>   By the way, do we need a BASIC to leave beta status? Our BASIC is a very
>   limited version, I wonder if anybody still buys MS DOS because of QBASIC ???
>   If yes, we cannot really offer QBASIC. But we could take efforts to have a
>   "no line numbers needed" clone of GWBASIC. Most people use QBASIC that way,
>   only few use the other (many) advanced features of QBASIC.

There are probably some out there that use QBASIC, though I'm not one of
them and what few programs I do have were written in GWBASIC.

That said it's a great project and seems to be very useful as it is now.

Paul