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FPC 2.6.2 released (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 19.03.2013, 00:08

Hi,

> Today I quickly tried current 2.6.2 version.
> I can't recommend it at all for DOS programmers.
These don't seem like dealbreakers to me. There are always bugs, and hopefully the workarounds are "good enough" if or until a proper fix is found.

> 1)
> There still remains the old pain of all 2.x.x FPC line for DOS - the bug
> (18113) in generating the alternate segment prefic code in generated
> assembler and machine code.
I know it's a pain, but try to separate out these particular bits of code and build that without the peephole optimizer. IIRC, that was the main problem. (Isn't there also a pragma to turn off optimization?)

> This bug is already fixed in 2.7.1 but the fix was not backtraced into
> 2.6.x line. I don't understand why.
I don't either. 2.6.2 is "stable" but still has bugs that should have been fixed. I guess they're overworked (volunteers, after all) or just very optimistic that 2.7.1 will come out fairly soon.

> 2)
> Again occured weird problems with environment settings when shelling into
> DOS. Under W98 it cuts some environment variables.
The only difference I see here is TMP and TEMP missing. Maybe that's intentional for some reason, dunno.

> 3)
> And the very new problem is the fatal IDE unstability. IDE almost always
> starts only first time. I start the IDE, compile and run the program (f.e.
> Hello.pas) and close IDE. But when I want to start IDE again it crashes
> with this error message:
>
> It occurs in both my systems - in FreeDOS and in Windows 98. To be able to
> start IDE again in FreeDOS I have to reboot the computer. Under W98 is
> enough to restart the DOS command prompt.
Ditto for me, as already mentioned. Also I don't know why. But just running (and exiting) INSTALL.EXE seems to reset / fix whatever bit that needs to be twiddled, thus the IDE can run again (for one instance). So that's a horribly kludgy but acceptable workaround. :-P

> So, unfortunately 2.6.2 is a bad version for DOS. The unability to restart
> the IDE is the killer bug.
If that's the only problem, then we're doing pretty good! :-D

> I recomend to stay with version 2.4.2 or, of course, with 1.0.10
Why not 2.4.4? ;-)

No, seriously, I doubt 1.0.10 is better. Sure, they had better DOS support in those days, but MarcoV will tell you a billion reasons why that version is deprecated (and not even mirrored anymore).

BTW, 2.6.2 "full install with sources" (FreeDOS, DOSLFN) chokes for me on DOCSRC.ZIP's options.tex for some odd reason. Deleting that file from the .ZIP seems to avoid the issue. Maybe a rare installer (unzip) bug.

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