DOS utils problem with 3.x versions

DOS utils problem with 3.x versions

[Diego Rodríguez Rodríguez]

Hi!

When I try to use any of the DOS utils included with dosemu (specially
EXITEMU) with M$-DOS 3.31 or DR DOS 3.41 I got the following message:
ERROR: inte6: unknown builtin:
With M$-DOS 3.30 I symply got a critical error prompt about being
unable to access C: unit.
(xdosemu Ctrl+Alt+Pgdown works fine, though)

What's wrong ?? dosemu docs. doesn't speack about minimal DOS version
requirements.

BTW: I tested PC/M$-DOS versions 5.0x and 6.xx as well as DR DOS 5.0,
6.0 (04/92 and 03/93 issues) and 7.0x and all works fine.

Re: DOS utils problem with 3.x versions

[Stas Sergeev]

Hello.

Diego RodrМguez RodrМguez wrote:
> What's wrong ?? dosemu docs. doesn't speack about minimal DOS version
> requirements.
Yes, but the reasonable requirements always do
exist. If you write some program, you'll certalinly
be suprised if someone will test in with linux-1.0
kernel, or will try to compile it on some gcc-1.0 etc.
Now dosemu, being a PC emulator, should in fact run
*any* version of DOS, and not even DOS (can run elks,
minix). But the supplied utilities are guaranteed
to work only with the default installation, which is
FreeDOS-based. They work with the other DOSes only as
a bonus. So the utilities are really a special part.
In your case the DOS doesn't set the process name
in an MCB, and dosemu looks there and can't figure
out what utility was started.
I am not sure if we have to keep the compatibility
of our utilities with such an ancient DOSes.  Of
course, overall, we have to keep the dependancies on
DOS as fewer as possible, and in this case it is
possible to make every utility to "authenticate"
itself, which will mitigate the problem and will
avoid the fragile code (IIRC, the name in MCB is even
an undocumented feature). But you can't completely
avoid the dependancies on DOS for utilities, so I am
not sure if it is necessary to address that particular
case by the cost of having the separate code for every
utility, while right now they all are just a symlinks
to generic.com.
Another solution may be to extract the name from
the argv[0]. This may work out right, but it is
about adding some code for the questionable benefit.
We can instead just fix the documentation to address
the problem.
If you really care about that issue, open an RFE at
the SF tracker. I feel like it should be addressed,
more than it shouldn't, if someone really cares.
Btw, you can just submit a patch yourself. Extracting
the name from argv[0] is not difficult at all. The
code in question is in builtins.c file, function
commands_plugin_inte6().

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