[fpc-devel] DOS Platforms

[Marco van de Voort]

> On Sunday 22 May 2005 10:17, Tomas Hajny wrote:
> 
> > > steps forward to be the maintainer for go32v2 there will be no DOS
> > > release anymore.
> >
> > To amend this - we're certainly willing to support such a volunteer
> > to reasonable extent, but we just don't have sufficient bandwidth for
> > full-featured support of this additional platform.
> 
> Alright. How much time would someone need for that task? Or, to be more 
> specific: what is known to need high priority work to get the most 
> basic stuff of a DOS-Compiler working?

Hard to say, since it is more getting deep knowledge and researching
that is limiting. If you are very deeply intimate with DPMI and the various
implementations, it will be way easier than if you are not.

Moreover, knowing the time to fix bugs, means knowing how to solve the bug,

Besides fixing the bugs, it means reading a busy internal maillist to react
to new changes that also affect go32v2 so that it doesn't get behind again,
and 1-2 times a year (or maybe 3-4 times a year if the new schedule keeps
up) spend a day or two on building a release archive.
 
> I'm certainly willing to commit /some/ time to that task. DOS is a 
> too-nice target, especially for embedded systems to just let it die, 
> but I'm a little bit overworked to work on such task full time.

The thing that needs most urgent fixing is exception handling (the various
division by zero, rte 216 etc in the bugreport) I think.