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Compatibility woes / deprecation (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 17.02.2009, 01:29

> VMs are not fine, since slower than normal.
Better than nothing.

> 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).
Depends on the person. I guess for building FPC, maybe. For my needs, a P166 is plenty fast. (Okay, so I don't rebuild GCC or Firefox or p7zip there, but still, I know what it's good for.) ;-)

> 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.
Try passing LD --reduce-memory-overheads (since it uses more memory by default in an attempt to speed itself up).

Have you tried the ELF "Gold" linker with FPC on *nix?

> 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.
Or Win9x devs too? Seriously, I find that hard to believe.

> 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).
2K works I think (ask rr), but that's 'cause they made it better in order to "merge" WinME and Win2K into one big product: WinXP. They wanted to make it an attractive sell. Vista? Apparently, it's all "advertising, advertising, advertising, fix Vista, advertising, advertising, ...".

> The few dos laggards remained on their "true" doses. So there was not much
> motivation to begin with.
Not true, a lot of people use WinXP etc. for their DJGPP development. I mean, Windows (besides offering a GUI) was initially meant as a DOS multitasker. Peoples' needs change, I understand, but I wish things wouldn't get deprecated or bitrot without a valid reason. Dropping DOS is one thing (which I disagree with, obviously), but dropping Win9x just seems self-destructive.

> No, but it does make the dos port less usable, since the pure dos users
> are far,far in the minority.
Which is a chicken and egg problem. If nobody tools support Win9x, nobody will develop for or run it. And then they'll whine, "Well, nobody's asked for it", but that's because they don't support it!!

> The world moved on, and some people prefered to stay behind. Now they are
> complaining they really got left behind.
No, they are complaining that things which should still work no longer will due to willful negligence of the vendors. And the whole point is that even hallowed Win32 won't remain stable enough, and that will be deprecated, new will come, that will be deprecated, ad infinitum ....

> > 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.
Not even close. Sure, there are some (small) Spanish-speaking minorities, but it's far far far from being widespread. (Besides, Spanish is well-covered in Latin-1, and which alone isn't enough of a need to move to more-complex Unicode.)

> Afaik the GNU substitute now worked reasonable. But I didn't test myself.
It was only half-finished. Even MS released MSUL way way way too late in the game.

> So because some bits are not translated, we should just chuck it entirely?
> Strange reasoning.
Um, your whole argument is "If no one uses it, why should we bother?" So you're effectively struggling with UTF-8 when nobody cares much beyond even Latin-1 (if even)!

> There are no developers for new releases. That is as good as a dead
> sentence.
But how did Win9x suddenly move from "good enough" to "bad"? And did they forget how to maintain it?? No!

> 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.
Very reckless attitude to kill good, working software. Ridiculous.

> The only win98 that I have seen in 4 years was the one I installed myself.
> It _IS_ rare.

I've only seen very very very few Europeans in 4 years, but that doesn't make them rare, too. :-P

> Odd. I wonder how I got my _64-bit_ (bigger) Vista in 8GB then.
Which is still 8x (or more) the size of XP.

> All versions were older. So it worked. The 2k system can make do with 64MB
> if you don't upgrade IE.
But ironically, Firefox 2.x was a bloated pig and only 3.x corrected some of that. And yet the machines who would most benefit (Win9x) aren't supported. Go figure.

> > 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.
Apparently you don't understand. Windows NT used to have POSIX, OS/2, and DOS subsystems. How many of those still work? Don't you see a trend here? And don't give me the marketshare crap. Why does it break? Is a new OS worth more somehow by actually doing less???

> 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.
Coding guidelines? As if those will stand the test of time either. MS will eventually probably move to managed code (and/or with hypervisor ... for Business and Ultimate only, I'm sure, ugh).

> See above XP couldn't run all 2k and nt4 (2k supported some nt4 ones)
> too.
And ME broke driver compatibility, just as Win95 did, just as Win16 did. So basically, every five years you have to upgrade to newer hardware, whether you want to or not. And that requires the latest Windows, too. And that requires more RAM, so you can't use older machines. But since newer drivers won't work anyways, oh well. (My digital camera is from 2005, not exactly old. Does Vista 2007 work with it? No. Not a huge deal, but when your printer, scanner, camera, software, etc. don't work, then what? Might as well buy a freakin' Mac!)

> > 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.
Then netbooks really are good, esp. because there is no optical drive at all. And yet will Windows 7 on the netbook be crippled similarly? Probably.

> > 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)
<sarcasm> Good for you. </sarcasm>

The whole point of things like ANSI C and POSIX is that it'll be portable. And yet what good is having standards like that if compliant systems are ignored for no reason?

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