aros fork?

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I guess AROS guys don't like to hang their dirty laundry in public :-)

No, seriously it's a good question... Rob has raised some really good points... mostly that AROS has no clear direction.. now is a good time to decide what we want from AROS... the floor is open...

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for £32,576.55 I'm gonna answer; drag the legacy kicking and screaming into the 21st Century :-)

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As I see it "AROS2" as we now seem to be calling it, will still be aros but with the cruft removed... exec and all the exec style structures will still be there, but some stuff is going to need the change to support new technologies and these changes will introduce incompatibilities... A price I'm prepared to pay!

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Belial6 wrote:
I kind of agree with you.  One of the biggest problems with the Amiga community right now is Amiga Inc..  They own Workbench and Kickstart.  We have new Amiga compatible hardware.  That problem has been taken care of.  We just have now way of running our old software.  If AROS were made to run on the 68k and be fully binary compatible with AmigaOS, we would have a solid place to start, and the term 'Amiga like' could be replaced with 'Aros like'.  This would allow the community to cut the line to the anchor that is Amiga Inc.

From there, upgrades and rewrites could happen in a more useful fashion.  The biggest thing about any future incompatible version of AROS is the ability for the OS to identify the version of an application that is required to run the code.

As far as I know, to date every platform leaves it to the application to make sure that it is compatible with the OS it runs on.  This means that when the application is abandoned, (as most Amiga software is) it quickly becomes unusable on new versions of the OS.

If the OS asks the application what version it runs on, it can sandbox anything that is no longer compatible, and seamlessly run it in a compatible environment.

The AROS source code is there... if anyone wanted to they could take it and get it compling on 68K... Bernd is the only one who has so far with his AFA... that sorce code is not going anywhere, It just takes someone with the motivation to do it...

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What I think everyone is missing here is not suggesting throwing away AROS and the associated systems and structures... What I think we are suggesting is where we need to modernize something and it will break compatibility then we should go for it... At the moment the default is to maintain compatibility even if that means ugly hacks to include new features.