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Compatibility woes / deprecation (Miscellaneous)

posted by marcov, 16.02.2009, 12:32

> > the main purpose to run it is FPC, something that takes 1-2 mins on a
> > Core2 2.4GHZ. VMs are annoying.
>
> VMs are fine, just slower than normal (although VT-X helps, e.g.
> VirtualBox).

VMs are not fine, since slower than normal.

> BTW, you can't expect everyone to have a Core2, e.g. netbooks.
netbooks are not for development but for surfing. And anything well above 1GHz is usable, it just takes longer (below 1GHz also but gets painful).

A stricter limit is memory, problem is that it is hard to give a figure, because it depends on the program size, usage/options etc. Also often the linker eats more memory than FPC itself.

> > On laptops it is even worse, hidden vendor partitions make it
> > more difficult. Then how to get ... (binutils, GDB)
> > being typically old and odd.
>
> Hidden restore partitions or hidden NTFS pieces (Dell??)?
Two. Restore and some media OS.

> And actually, tons more OSes have ports of BinUtils than I originally
> expected.
> That's why the ridiculous amount of obsolete Emacs stuff scared
> me. Why delete what isn't broken?
See earlier msgs. Nothing is broken, old versions keep working. It is only if you want new stuff, you will have a problem. But then, for new stuff, no dos maintainer can be found.

> To be honest, NT was never exactly DOS-friendly, and I guess it's a more
> limited rewrite.

Actually, it seems a lot of it was in the extenders, since nowadays it is way better than it used to. IIRC NT4 didn't even allow LFN extensions in a dosbox. (2k too? Can't remember).

> I guess they never knew how to fix it (and thus didn't
> care as much).

The few dos laggards remained on their "true" doses. So there was not much motivation to begin with.

> Anyways, for real DOS, you don't have such DPMI memory limits. X32 can use
> 3 GB, WDOSX and CWSDPMI and PMODE/DJ can use 2 GB, HDPMI32 can use 2 GB (or
> more??). So blaming Windows' memory limits on DOS isn't fair (although I
> know what you're saying ... obviously people use and develop on Windows a
> lot).
No, but it does make the dos port less usable, since the pure dos users are far,far in the minority.

> > WinME is near 10 years old.
> 8.5 :-P

Close enough.

> > The world has moved on.
>
> No, MS moved on and the world got stuck anyways (although I'm not saying
> ME was the best ever). Some people here even prefer Win98SE over it.
The world moved on, and some people prefered to stay behind. Now they are complaining they really got left behind.

> > The push to unicode is massive in Open Source projects.
> > The w9x phasing out already started.
>
> I don't think that's why Win9x is less utilized.

No it isn't. It is just killing it off since usage has waned.

> And Unicode isn't nearly as important in the U.S. (almost entirely > monolingual) as in Europe, etc.
Hmm. I thought the US mostly spoke Spanish now? Moreover they sell abroard.

> > Sure there are ways around (MSLU and the like, and there is even a GNU
> > substitute), but that is another DIY job to figure everything out.
>
> MSLU has some weird license (as usual) and the GNU substitute is only
> half-finished and seems abandoned. Actually, the rewrite is what Firefox
> used to use, I think.
Afaik the GNU substitute now worked reasonable. But I didn't test myself.

> > No it doesn't, since their stance on user interfaces is totally
> different
> > and they actually lead the way there.
>
> Try "export LANG=eo:en" sometime and see how much is still shown in
> English. All the interfaces in the world can't get translations. It's
> because it's not a priority to most people (for good or bad).
So because some bits are not translated, we should just chuck it entirely? Strange reasoning.

> But there is no reason to kill off DOS / Win9x / Win2k support
> that works fine.

There are no developers for new releases. That is as good as a dead sentence.
So no more new releases. After a while, also the old releases will be kicked indeed. (If I don't support it, I don't want it on my site), hence my suggestion to start an archival group if you really care.

> It's not exactly rare and unknown. That's the whole point!
The only win98 that I have seen in 4 years was the one I installed myself. It _IS_ rare. And most that I knew before were not in use as general purpose computers (needing upgrades), but just doing some specific task (some old administration program or hw related thing).

> > The ratio XP(org)/2k(sp3) was not that different from Vista/XPsp2
>
> Um, I think XP can install in a GB of space, but Vista requires like 16
> GB.
Odd. I wonder how I got my _64-bit_ (bigger) Vista in 8GB then.

> > I ran w2k on a 128MB machine, using Outlook,word (2k), Mozilla
> milestones
> > and adobe acrobat. Later when I got 192MB I could even run them
> > concurently.
>
> Word, Firefox, and Acrobat are all huge, huge RAM pigs.
All versions were older. So it worked. The 2k system can make do with 64MB if you don't upgrade IE.

> I in no way love XP to death. It was worse in many ways to Win9x.

Only in the dos support. I don't know any other way.

> And Vista is even worse still in compatibility (not just DOS but Win32
> programs as well). Which is bad, really annoying, should've been 100%
> avoidable.
It was determinate, enforcing coding guidelines that already were specified for XP. I don't like it either (because IMHO the use is limited), but let's not exaggerate it.

> > That's partially true. XP couldn't run some 2k drivers, and there were
> > some apps broken early on when run in Themed mode (the early Teletubby
> > mode was full of bugs), but it was relatively minor. Still that is not
> > what the outrage about Vista (which is IMHO exaggerated) is about.
>
> Vista can't even run all XP drivers.
See above XP couldn't run all 2k and nt4 (2k supported some nt4 ones) too.

> I read somewhere that MS at the last minute broke driver compatibility for some unknown reason.

Reference? The new DRM guidelines (that Hollywood btw forced upon MS) broke already a lot.

> So what little gfx support was in Windows has vanished.
Don't care. Can't remember the time I ran a graphical dos app (well probably it was DV/X)

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