OpenWatcom Discussion

[Dave Yeo]

....One version of Watcom being incompatible with the next and unfortunately picking the "official" version does not help because it is the one that is buggy.

Where are you getting an official version of OW? Last was 1.9 and there are betas on netlabs that seem as compatible with that as any.
There is Jiri's fork, I doubt that he tests OS/2.

[Lars]

Watcom 1.9 is what supposedly everybody should use, so I called that "official". But for a seldomly used feature ("based pointers") it produces an incorrect binary (for code executing in Ring 0 -> device drivers) where Watcom 2.0 will work properly. But Watcom 2.0 is "Jiri's fork" where you never know what he will do next.

Is there a possibility at all to report a bug against Watcom 1.9 ?

[Andi B.]

Watcom 1.9 is what supposedly everybody should use, so I called that "official". But for a seldomly used feature ("based pointers") it produces an incorrect binary (for code executing in Ring 0 -> device drivers) where Watcom 2.0 will work properly. But Watcom 2.0 is "Jiri's fork" where you never know what he will do next.

Is there a possibility at all to report a bug against Watcom 1.9 ?

Is this bug new to 1.9 or 1.8 or ...

There's still alive the #watcom chat group and Michal is hanging around there. I don't think the perforce server will ever get started again. There's also Stevens OW copy at github - https://github.com/StevenLevine/openwatcom-v1. But it seems he don't allow issues there. Maybe we should email Frank? But I fear he lost interest on OW since a while.

Edit - Michal says this https://github.com/iainnicol/open-watcom-1.x/tree/openwatcom 'should be a very accurate conversion of the P4 depot to git, but it's not meant as a working copy:'. Looking a bit in the commits it seems to me Stevens repository is much ahead of that. Although Michal says he will accept fixes I think an email to Steven would be the best chance to get something fixed in the near future.

Basically it's the same problem as always - if different people put different repositories online no one knows what's the best one to use. If there's no clear lead for a project it's useless in the long run even if there exist different source repos. Currently I don't know what I should think about the next fork of Martin here - https://github.com/OS2World/DEV-TOOLS-IDE-openwatcom-v1. Of course I circumvent Jiris sites including his sourceforge.net one.

[Alex Taylor]

FWIW, I understand from Steven that his repository should be considered the "current" one.

[Andi B.]

FWIW, I understand from Steven that his repository should be considered the "current" one.

I think so. But there's no possibility for filling issues. Also I don't find a complete package there. I for myself use the latest package what Frank build and what he put on his server. But I think his site doesn't exist anymore :-(.

Btw. thanks Lars for your comment here. This brought to my attention to test with older watcom releases with a project I worked a few days ago. It does behave strange with my OW1.9++.

[Silvan Scherrer]

FWIW, I understand from Steven that his repository should be considered the "current" one.

hmm official w/o bugtracker is a bit....
As sending bugs via email is last century. And all those get forgotten anyway. just my opinion.

[Lars]

As a very wild ass guess, it might have to do with this change added by Juri to the Watcom 2 (fixing my problem):

https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/commit/e905d92c6d3b5b7c22845e4450bd9a7ba5b87757

But I am far from being sure. I am not a compiler expert.

[Steven Levine]

When talking about repositories, current is a subjective term.  The same is true for which is best.

The OpenWatcom repository Gregg and I maintain was intended as a placeholder until Michal got openwatcom.org back up an running.  The lack of an issues tracker was an oversight, which has been corrected. Silvan is the first to mention it.

Gregg and I had commits that needed to be made, so the repo came to be.

The repository is a fork of Jiri Malak's https://github.com/open-watcom/owp4v1copy, which is about 3 years old.
Jiri's owp4v1copy was current as of when the Perforce repository went away.

Jiri's owp4v1copy is significantly newer than iainnicol's.

Jiri's OpenWatcom repositories have been around for a while.  He created them back in 2012.

[Dave Yeo]

So Jiri has two github repositories? Reading the newsgroup, I see his announcement on 07/30/12 and then Lynn posting on 02/13/14 "The Open Watcom unofficial fork project has its
own version 2.0 now", to quote Jiri further down the thread,

Initial base is at change 37426 (OW 1.9).
All important changes after 37426 were aplied to V2 fork.
Some changes were not included because they are problematic or introduce
some problem.

Anyway V2 fork is too different from Perforce now that back nerge to OW 1.9
has no much sense.
I think that oficial OW is now realy dead.

Now I have to restart SeaMonkey as it is not happy after downloading the 13.5K headers that were on the news server, openwatcom contributers.
Actually, should I download all the bodies and make them available somewhere, I have access to the other newsgroups that were carried on the Open Watcom news server as well, back to around 2005.

[Silvan Scherrer]

The lack of an issues tracker was an oversight, which has been corrected. Silvan is the first to mention it.

perfect thanks. makes life easier.

[Lars]

@Silvan: Added my 2 cents worth to your trap description.