[nos-bbs] NOS, CYGWIN, WIN32, DJGPP, and future porting issues ...

[Maiko Langelaar (ve4klm)]

Skip wrote :

> Isn't this a "natural progression"?

Yes it is.

> Perhaps jnos suffers today from neglect (I hate that word actually) to
> remain current year by year thru that progression ?

Perhaps it's just that the O/S on which NOS depended on for so long has
dramatically changed over the years.

It does not help that the powers to be suddenly decide to remove mechanisms
like JMPBUF the way they did, it would have been nice to see some compiler 
warnings saying so in a previous version of distribution. If someone wants
to correct me on that, please do. To be fair, it's no secret that setjmp
and longjmp were considered obsolete, but to take the MS approach and just
get rid of it on the *next upgrade* is perhaps a bit too much (or is it).

This reminds me of the day that Windows updated Internet Explorer one 
year. Remember when CGI apps *were not written correctly* and you had
to set an environment variable to give the length of the POST, where
up till then you simply null terminated the request or something like
that ? Do you realize how much grief that caused *users* when they
upgraded Internet Explorer and us the developer had no warning. We
had to dig deep (way out of the public light) to discover a small
article in the knowledge base. Funny thing is that Netscape Browser
supported both the old and new, so netscape users were not affected.

But, that seems to be the way of the software industry, and we just
have to learn to cope with issues as they pop up. Besides, it makes
it alot more fun to play with then :-)

> Perhaps THREAD is just another part of that modernization process?

Yep !

> Sounds like you may be announcing jnos / nos has reached a similar point?

Probably so. That's the way I've been feeling about it lately.

Maiko Langelaar / VE4KLM