DOS ain't dead

SvarCOM version 2022.3 available (Announce)

posted by rr  , Berlin, Germany, 13.03.2022, 14:05

On 13 March 2022 Mateusz Viste released SvarCOM version 2022.3.

What is SvarCOM?

Quoting from http://svardos.org/svarcom/:
SvarCOM is the SvarDOS command line interpreter, known usually under the name "COMMAND.COM". It is designed and maintained by Mateusz Viste, and distributed under the terms of the MIT license.

For the time being, it is a work-in-progress project that - although functional - is not entirely polished yet and might miss a few bits and pieces. SvarCOM version 2022.0 must be considered a "preview" version. See the documentation included in the zip file for details.

SvarCOM is minimalist and I'd like to keep it that way. It aims to be functionaly equivalent to COMMAND.COM from MS-DOS 5.x/6.x. No LFN support.

As of version 2022.0, SvarCOM's resident footprint is under 2 KiB.

What is new in version 2022.3?

Here is his 2022.3 announcement to the SvarDOS mailing list:
Hello all,

SvarCOM 2022.3 has been published right now. It comes with many
improvements and bug fixes. Many thanks to Robert Riebisch who dedicated
a lot of time to perform extensive tests on SvarCOM and had the strength
to annoy me over and over about the various glitches he found.

The new SvarCOM package is already available on the SvarDOS packages
repository. It can also be downloaded from the SvarCOM sub-project page
at http://svardos.org/svarcom

As an experiment I did a SvarDOS build that uses SvarCOM instead of
FreeCOM. It is the build 20220312, available in the "files" section of
the website: http://svardos.org/?p=files

If this build proves stable enough, it might become the default download
presented on the main page, but for now it needs some testing. There is
also still one or two things that needs to be added (like DIR/O support).

The main advantage of SvarCOM over the legacy FreeCOM is that the former
is much lighter (2K of memory footprint), which is esp. important on
pre-386 machines.

An interesting side effect of replacing FreeCOM by SvarCOM is that some
of the SvarDOS floppy sets decreased:

720K set went from 4 floppies to 3 floppies
1.2M set went from 3 floppies to 2 floppies

Other sets remained the same amount of floppies (6x 360K, 2x 1.44M and
1x 2.88M)

Note for the future: there are cases where it is possible to decrease
the amount of floppies simply by ordering files on the floppies
differently. For instance, it is possible to decrease the 360K set to 5
floppies now, just by moving files from disk #6 to other disks. This is
something that will be optimized in the future, but I don't want to do
it manually, it has to be an automated process, and the installer must
be aware of the exact disposition of files on floppies to avoid asking
twice for the same floppy.

Mateusz

Changes since last release (2022.2) are:
- fixed stdin redirection handling (was broken since 2022.1) [#44027]
- only COM, EXE and BAT files are allowed for execution [#44068]
- FOR command: accepts control characters as pattern delimiters [#44058]
- FOR command: patterns without wildcards are processed as messages [#44058]
- implemented the TRUENAME command [#44051]
- DIR command: /a:xxx is supported like an equivalent to /axxx [#44077]
- VER command: displays DOS memory location (low, HMA, ROM...) [#44050]
- VER command: displays true DOS version and DOS rev (bttr) [#44050]
- REN command: allows renaming directory names [#44060]
- implemented CTTY and LOADHIGH/LH as no-ops (LH loads programs low)
- LN creates %DOSDIR%\LINKS directory when needed and warns on error [#44042]
- LN ADD outputs an error message when link already exists [#44043]
- added Polish translations
- added German translations, courtesy of Robert Riebisch (bttr)
- added French translations, kindly contributed by Berki Yenigun (thraex)
- added Turkish translations, submitted by Berki Yenigun (thraex)
- fixed and improved English help screens

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Forum admin

Complete thread:

• SvarCOM version 2022.3 available - rr, 13.03.2022, 14:05 (Announce)
  • SvarCOM version 2022.3 available - roytam, 15.03.2022, 14:03
    • SvarCOM version 2022.3 available - rr, 15.03.2022, 20:01
      • SvarCOM version 2022.3 available - rr, 16.03.2022, 09:21
  • SvarCOM version 2022.4 available - rr, 12.04.2022, 15:57