Re: DJGPP

[Bruno Haible]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

[Removed DJ Delorie from the CC list since I have no reason to write him.]

> Bruno, would you please stop telling other people that their projects
> are dead, obsolete, etc. (as you probably won't want others tell you)?
> You are being unkind and unfair, something I would not expect from you
> (or any other active participant of the Free Software movement, for
> that matter).

Removing support for obsolete systems is a must for maintainability,
when the time has come. I already removed from GNU clisp the support
for Atari ST, EMX and DJGPP that I wrote myself. And the support for
AmigaOS that one of my best friends wrote. And the support for Linux 1.0.x
kernels that had no working mprotect().

> For starters, the ``horrible hacks'' of the 8+3 alias
> names plague MinGW programs no less than they do DJGPP programs,
> because they are inherent in the Windows filesystems.

Sorry to contradict you, but other than problems with directories named
"CON" or similar, I've not seen problems with filenames in programs
compiled with MSVCRT on Windows NT/XP systems.

> I can only assume that your own personal experience with using MinGW
> for serious development is close to nil, because MinGW has yet to
> arrive at the level of integration, coherency, and Posix compliance
> that DJGPP gives its users since 1996.

If you want POSIX compliance, you need cygwin, not mingw.

> Don't misunderstand me: I use MinGW ports, and applaud those who work
> on it.  But one cannot call MinGW ``a platform of choice'' on Windows,
> not yet.

But also, I cannot call DJGPP a "platform of choice" on Windows either.
Care to take a look at the GNU clisp build instructions for DJGPP and
compare them to those for EMX?
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/clisp/clisp/dosdjgpp/Attic/INSTALL?rev=1.2&view=auto
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/clisp/clisp/dos/Attic/INSTALL?rev=1.3&view=auto

> And I can only wonder what myth caused you to write that DJGPP became
> obsolete in 1995, since 4 years later, in 1999, Japanese Emacs
> developers were excited when I installed the DJGPP port of Emacs on
> their laptops running Windows 9x.

That was 1999. Since then, Emacs has NT support integrated, and it's hard
to buy a copy of Windows 95/98/ME.

Bruno