Messages

1366

Programming / Re: OS/4 ? QSINIT ?

« on: January 06, 2014, 01:10:18 pm »

Another point for my original 5):

somewhere in one of these discussion groups here I read that there is some bug in Veit Kannegieser's PCIBUS.SNP that causes problems with the OS/4 kernel. Why was Veit not contacted ? I have contacted him in the past and while he is obviously pretty busy with his "real life" job he is certainly going to help where he can. While the OS/4 team doesn't like the idea of "closed source" they tend towards the very same behaviour:
1) do it all yourself
2) don't talk to anybody else
3) keep everything to yourself, not the binaries but the knowledge
4) don't document anything

I think I am qualified to utter these statements. I have put considerable work in fixing the OS/2 USB stack. And I am doing it for free as I have my own "real life" job. David cannot do it for free. He is doing it for a living.
The OS/2 source code is freely available from the netlabs SVN server. We (David and I) don't hide anything from anybody.
One just need to ask Adrian Gschwend for getting an account.

About the binaries not being freely delivered: who is going to pay David if everything is given away for free ? You DO HAVE the option to build the updated USB drivers yourself (but you need to know how to run a compiler, assembler, linker, make utility).
What Mensys does is keeping the strings together and making sure that all updates and necessary fixes and also new stuff go into a common distribution. That is quite some work and not everybody can do this work for free.


Lars

1367

Programming / OS/4 ? QSINIT ?

« on: January 05, 2014, 02:32:06 pm »

I don't doubt that the developers are skilled people. However I doubt that this project will be of any relevance if it continues in the current way. I just want to state my opinions here and I won't go into the "legal/illegal" issue.
I am open to any comment, good or bad:

1) I would have never found the website. Fortunately, one of Martin's comments pointed to it. The project needs more promotion. A good way would be to be present in the most frequented OS/2 newsgroups

2) from the website, it's completely unobvious of what the latest version is for the OS4 core project. I'd go with the SVN revision numbers but I could never be sure. It's also not clear what version was reasonably stable and what version was not. I would also think it would be a good idea to remove all versions that proved to be too unstable for most testers.

3) it's completely unobvious in how far the QSINIT project relates to the OS4 project. Does QSINIT "overwrite" the OS2LDR contained in the OS/4 zips ? What would be the benefit to use QSINIT in favor of the OS2LDR that comes with the OS/4 kernel zip ? Is that the same group of developers of these 2 projects ?

4) there is no FAQ that would collect common problems or such. Also there is about no documentation. All the information is contained in the few postings floating around on the os2world website. Who is going to bother and go through the effort to test the OS/4 kernel if he is more or less completely on his own ? Not too many people I would think ...

5) there is too little feedback back into the developer community. One of the topics has already been addressed: David as the ACPI developer should be taken into the loop. Me might not be inclined to support the OS4 kernel but I'd say it's the OS/4 people's job to get in touch with him. At least that would make sense ...

6) all of the website is in cyrillic (russian, anyway). I know it might be not that easy but at least a bit of english would be helpful (we are not talking about perfect english here). It's just a major hinderance in attracting anybody to try and test and support development of the OS/4 kernel.

For me, 2) and 3) and 4) are the most pressing problems. And they surely have no relation to the "legal" / "illegal" question.


Ok, let the shitstrom begin ...


Lars

1368

Setup & Installation / Re: Strange and annoying problem with printing.

« on: December 28, 2013, 04:51:39 pm »

1) What happens if you unplug and plug back in the Printer ? Does that help ?
2) use Version 11.06 of the Drivers. It has just been released and is available via Betazone.

1369

Article Discussions / Re: WPS Classes Clone

« on: November 30, 2013, 04:16:42 pm »

Martin: I have sent the "PostWhat" WPS class source code to your private email address. This source code comes with no warranty whatsoever and may be freely used. If you place it on EDM, please add the additonal notes that I gave you in my email as to what the assumed prerequisites are.

1370

Article Discussions / Re: WPS Classes Clone

« on: November 24, 2013, 01:21:20 pm »

May I add my opinion:

1) rewrite WPS: forget it. I guess about 100 man years or even more that went into this task. In my opinion it would be much more efficient to iron out the problems in some of the WPS classes and to add the functionality that is missing. A good example is XWorkplace.

2) "HWMan" example: when I wrote this HWManager class replacement the problem was not the lack of documentation of the HWManager class or that part of the HWManager interface is only private. The biggest problem I was facing was that the Resource Manager interface (accessible via RMINFO.DLL from an application) is not fully documented. I had to do trial and error.
For the private part of the HWManager interface (the part not published via the IDL file): with some trial and error and good guesswork I could guess the method signature of those methods that are private and the XWP class manager helped me in guessing what the method names were. The nice thing about SOM is that you can query a method address via its method name. In other words: That allows you to access methods that are not published by the IDL file.

3) sc.exe: remember that sc.exe is just a very shallow front end to the "Emitter" SOM classes. When you say you want an sc.exe replacement you will need to rebuild the "Emitter" class libraries. sc.exe just invokes methods of these SOM classes. The DLLs can be found as "emitxxx.dll" in the \OS2TK45\SOM\LIB subdirectory. As you can see from the names, it's these SOM classes that generate the source files with the corresponding file extensions.

4) learning about SOM / WPS: for my own learing progress I implemented a WPS class that realizes those yellow sticky notes.
This class is derived from the WPAbstract class (which also means it is placing all its content text into OS2.INI ...)
As an additional learning effort I also implemented a replacement class for that class that, stupid enough, just changes the coloring from a yellow sticky note to a red sticky note. While I did some stuff unnecessarily complicated and I would design it differently today there are quite a few things you can learn from that example:
a) how to remove and add menu items to an objects menu and tie these to functionality
b) how to add a completely new view to an object (that is none of the icon/structure/tree views but rather a new custom view), how to add this new view to the use list and how to make it show up in the window list
c) how to do some cleanup in OS2.INI on object deletion where WPAbstract does not do the job properly
d) how to do exception handling for a WPS class
f) how FFST (first failure support technology) works to add logging info to the system log (used by the classes to write exception info to the system log)
g) how a replacement class works / how you derive one class from another class

I never fully completed it but if anyone is interested I can clean it up a little and make a zip file from it. If someone can tell me where to put it ...

Lars