Os 3.2 development preview

[kolla]

Please also note the type of adapter you have, and which of the identification protocols it speaks. I have about four of them.

I still don't grasp this "identification protocol" you keep mentioning - how does a cable and two diods "identify" itself?

[kolla]

You intend to redistribute the binary.

Why would I distribute anything?

I just care about my own systems, of which some have more than 2 devices attached to the IDE bus.

If someone else in the same situation asks for a binary patch, I would send it to them.
Chances are, it would distribute itself over time.

[kolla]

One should know that CyberGraphX is not abandoned, it lives on as part of MorphOS.

[kolla]

That's abandoned enough for 68K users, I afraid.

I would say it is the other way around - the 68k users were abandoned, not the software :-)

Anyways, considering history and all the badmouthing Hyperion people have served MorphOS and its developers, I very much doubt that anyone from "the blue side" has any interest in supporting anything that is related to Hyperion.

Another one of those things that may change if Cloanto wins the ongoing court cases.

[kolla]

No, because then a lot of other bad things will happen.

Scaremongery much?

I don’t see anything bad about Cloanto taking over, only a lot of positive things.

[kolla]

I don’t see anything bad about Cloanto taking over, only a lot of positive things.

Another fanboy then, as expected.

If I was a fan boy, you would think I also favour their products, but I don’t. I bought Amiga4Ever way back when I was still a little involved with bttr, but mostly for the extras, and I also bought their “personal” collection, but that was it, I always found their Amiga software awkward to use, and their attempt to recreate windowsish registry nuts.

But this is not about “pro Cloanto” as much as it is about being against Hyperion, I have said all along that there will have to be another “back to scratch” development from 3.1 once the nonsensical legal situation is cleared up, and I am fine with that, especially since the current development is going very much in a wrong direction IMO. If Hyperion “win”, OS3 will be in same state as OS4 within very short time.

[kolla]

@TribbleSmasher

Why not just use “ACTIVE=0” (or was it ACTIVATE, aka MOUNT iirc) in the mount entry? Because you need to rescan the bus?

[kolla]

@kolla
You say you don't see anything bad about Cloanto taking over.  I must say I beg to differ with you. Firstly, Cloanto has made it abundantly clear that if they win the court case 3.1.4 will be discarded. He has said this quite publicly on numerous occasions,and very firmly I might add. There are a few other things he has said that have my eyebrows on the ceiling.

I don't really see this as a bad thing, I see this as a necessity.

but 3.1.4 is by far and away the most important.  In fact they have almost rectified the damage they have done in the past.

Not at all, I disagree - OS3.1.4 (and this new 3.2) now shows all signs of falling in the same path as OS4 - how is that a good thing?

It was supposed to be a bugfix and update of 3.1, instead it pulls in components from 3.5/3.9 as well as OS4 and introduces tons of new bugs and issues.

To make matters worse, many of these bugs are in the kickstart chips that still are being sold.

3.1.4.1 fixes many, but far from all these bugs, and 3.1.4.1 will be the last "free update", as 3.2 will be another product, and one with a vast amount of changes that go well beyond what OS 3.9 did, more and more becoming "OS 4 for 68k". Which brings me to...

OS 4.x is a terrible mess

Exactly.

[kolla]

Guess we just got immune to this old annoyance over the decades.

Speaking of... Workbench menu, would be nice if "Update all" not just re-position icons in open windows, but also the icons on the Workbench desktop.

[kolla]

- If the list command found a directory name that looked like a wildcard, it took this name as wild card to match for listing its contents. This is really a bizarre bug that was caused due to the way how list handles its recursion.

- LFORMAT did not prepare its output in a way that is compatible to the shell syntax. That is, if directory or file names were found that contained asterisks or quotes, those asterisks or quotes are now escaped if lformat prints the arguments within quotes.

Then, we have one new command line argument for list, namely "FLAT". If this is given, then LFORMAT does not enter a directory if the given argument is a directory.

Sheesh, who is that person who reports and requests such obscure features.

[kolla]

My perception of it is from 4.1FE on Classic. It's an abysmal experience, I have no idea why they insist on supporting hardware that is much too slow to use it properly. Actually, supporting is a bit much because the damn thing wouldn't boot unless I removed it's broken fastata driver. Running it was nothing but an exciting way to make my 1200T run out of ram.

Emulators are nice. I have OS4.1FE on my A3000/CSPPC/CVPPC (and what... 640MB RAM?), but due to the Roadshow component having ancient bugs that were fixed on Roadshow/68k years and years ago, it cannot reliably go online. It really sucks that Olsen cannot update Roadshow for OS4. This is the type of scenario I expect to arrive on 68k OS3 as well - authors having updates, but Hyperion having zero interest in organizing "boingbags" and publishing them.

[kolla]

I don't really see this as a bad thing, I see this as a necessity.

And why is that? And what is wrong with the direction?

It is clearly a legal necessity, since code has been trickling down from OS4. Right?

(Unless a certain entity buys out entire Hyperion - who knows, that would solve a lot)

You already know what I find wrong with the current direction, so no need to answer that again. Especially since all you do with any answer I give is to call me a "hater" and question my mental health. 

what is wrong with a printer.device that prints correctly, an animation datatype that multitasks correctly and a CD file system that supports UDF? All these components came somehow into 3.1.4 through integration of 4.x components, just ,reviewed and bug-fixed to the amount necessary

Nothing wrong with that per se, but by nilly-willy pulling in OS4 components, the legal situation of the code gets even more entangled.

The 3.x series is a very conservative approach to the development, quite unlike 3.9 was and much less than 4.x attempted to be.

Unlike 3.9? Really. I don't find 3.5 and 3.9 to be very "radical" compared to 3.1, nothing fundamental was changed. With 3.2 there will be quite a few fundamental changes though, like system-startup, loading kickstart components from disk and setting up various devices pre-boot.

In fact, you really bewilder me: At the one hand, you ask for experimental components like 4-way adapter support, which we cannot test to the amount necessary to make it a product as robust as I would like to have it

And this bewilders me - IDEFix97 is named this for a reason - it came about in 1997 - it is more than 20 years ago. And support in other operating systems came along within a few years. And as it turns out, OS3.9 and OS4 also has had support all along... so, is it really experimental? Or do you prefer to name anything you have not had any hands-on experience with "experimental"?

How can it be, that the AmigaOS team is lacking so much in terms of hardware?

And refrain from using emulators as test cases?? This is _exactly_ what makes WinUAE so extremely useful, it has pretty much accurate emulation of _tons_ of Amiga hardware - and then the OS developers refuse to touch it? I find this ridiculous!

, at the other hand, you deny any development of components you don't appreciate and that are not even central to the Os experience. For example, the GUI will still be gadtools-based, thus rather lightweight, so why do you speak so hateful about reaction as it does not impact you at all. It may, however, improve the experience of other users that wait to have it.

"hateful"? You should save your superlatives to the times when they are truly needed.

Regarding the Reaction classes, I have two issues
* they are not the most efficient, nor the visually prettiest, often looking out of place
* more importantly - they are now considered Hyperion property and part of the "arsenal" against a better future.

You seem to have a very one-sided view on the development. "Only what I want, everything else is shit".

No, "anyone free to have whatever anyone wish" is what I would prefer.

To make matters worse, many of these bugs are in the kickstart chips that still are being sold.

Oh, worse, Cloanto sells 3.1 ROMs or 3.x ROMs ("developped without a license" (tm)) with even more bugs in it. Why isn't that bad? I believe it is actually worse, selling the old shit again, with the old bugs in it.

Old bugs that are _well known_ - which makes a huge difference.

We all understand, and you should appreciate this as well, that with a small developer group and - more important  - a small group of beta-testers, our means are limited, yet we try the very best to fix what we broke.

Your resources are limited by choice - you could have tons more beta-testers (and more hardware available) if you chose a different approach.

And again I recommend to make a release candidate or two available in the wild for public testing at least for a month or two before burning and selling kickstart chips - it would _REALLY_ help a lot.

In 3.2, the System-Startup was designed to limit the impact of ROM bugs as many RAM components can be upgraded from disk without requiring the installation of a new ROM, and without requiring a reboot.

I do not mind rebooting, I don't know why so many care so much, makes me wonder if their systems are so unstable that boot time is so important. For me it is more important that systems are easy to debug, that they don't do unexpected things (like picking up some random ROM component from a filesystem that owner is using as download area)

3.1.4.1 fixes many, but far from all these bugs, and 3.1.4.1 will be the last "free update",

Apparently, you know more about the 3.1.4 updates than I do.

Well, if you know different, then please feel free to elaborate.
I have seen people asking if there will be a 3.1.4.5 or so, but no answer has been given as far as I have seen, so...

as 3.2 will be another product, and one with a vast amount of changes that go well beyond what OS 3.9 did, more and more becoming "OS 4 for 68k".

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Don't you think it is necessary to advance the 3.x line a bit?

Necessary? Not at all - cool, but not necessary. But that was not what I was writing, was it - I was writing that what is presented here, with this 3.2 line, is much more of a change over 3.1 than what OS3.5 and 3.9 ever was.

It is a less radical update than 3.9, the GUI stays pretty much the same.

The "GUI" was not changed in 3.9 either, less so, as it was still good old 3.1 Intuition.

Now we have Intuition.library v45 - based on original sources and rewritten from scratch, as the OS4 advert says...

OS3.5/3.9 with Reaction classes was not a dramatical change over OS3.1 with ClassAction, with exception of Workbench and ASL Prefs, one could still use old 3.1 Prefs programs if that was needed.

The only really radical changes about 3.5/3.9 was Workbench with AREXX support - which 3.1.4 and 3.2 also has, and explicit need for 020 on certain components - most annoyingly the resource.library.

Though what is wrong with a GUI that is no longer based on topaz.8, without the complexity of reaction?

Nothing - I welcome this. Too bad it will be entangled with Hyperion legalese.

What is bad about iconification gadgets in system tools?

That remains to be seen - depends how it behaves in certain corner cases.

What is wrong with windows you can drag out of the screen?

Well, I prefer this turned off, as it does not fit with my "workflow" where I often push windows to the screen border, or resize against a screen border. I would very much prefer to set qualifier that I can hold if I wish to drag windows off-screen. Also, without being able to have windows larger than screen, I really see very little use for it at all.

What is wrong with TAB-expansion in the Shell?

Nothing, it should have been there twenty-odd years ago.

None of these changes are radical, just slight tweaks, without impacting the overall "feel" of the Amiga.

The "feel" of Amiga is quite different depending on who you ask, the "feel" is not really important. What is important is how these changes are coming about, the timing and the context. It is _extremely_ "Amiga", and I don't mean that in a good way.

Which brings me to...

OS 4.x is a terrible mess

Exactly.

I do not know, and I do not care too much. The reason why I don't care about 4.x is that I never understood what a re-development of a retro-os on another outdated CPU platform is supposed to become.

It makes just as much sense as development of a retro-os on an original outdated CPU - sensewise, OS3 and OS4 are in the same boat.

I do not understand AROS for the same reason. If I would develop an Os from scratch, I would certainly not re-implement all the design errors of AmigaOs from scratch - so what's the point? There are better open portable operating systems than Amiga.

And nothing prevents you. The point of AROS was to scratch an itch, not to offer a product, nor to please anyone else but the developers themselves. Not like your work has much more point.

The only point in the 3.x development is to get rid of the "rough edges" of 3.1 and to integrate functionality into the Os that was otherwise provided by patches and hacks, with all the instabilities these provide. This is not about "creating a new operating system for 68K", because if I would want that, I would certainly not start from something as absurd as AmigaOs.

Say it again, louder, so that people can hear you.

What is the roadmap, exactly what patches and hacks do you want to get rid of? At what point do you consider OS3 finished?

[kolla]

One thing I've noticed with list is a different behavior when listing a directory versus listing the filename in the directory, when a new file is currently getting copied by workbench into that directory:

1) Listing the directory containing the new file, I don't get any DOS errors and everything is fine.
2) Listing the file in the directory by itself, I get a "No information for <filename>: object is in use"

You can also go around this by listing the <filename, replacing any char of its name with a ? wildcard>

What happens is that List will try to "lock" whatever object is specified as argument, and if that file is in use, it will fail. The "absurdity" is perhaps that List will not attempt to lock anything if the argument contains a wildcard... Thomas has already explained earlier why things are as they are, and while it makes total sense, it is utterly absurd UX wise.

[kolla]

It's what bullies like Kolla do: angry if you do, angry if you don't.

First of all, I am not angry, not at all.

And secondly, "bullies"? I suggest you read yourself up on what "bullying" actually means and perhaps look up "sycophancy" while you are at it.

I am not the one questioning other people's mental health or resorting to name calling here.

Btw - when you do "Resident >NIL: C:Assign PURE" "to speed things up a little", and then go on to use "C:Assign" every time afterwards - how much to you think you speed things up by keeping the Assign command resident?

[kolla]

- Conclip was updated for the new con-handler features. Once loaded, CON:-windows can be iconified, and icons can be dragged into them.

Do iconified CON:-windows act as app-icons?
Can for example scripts be dropped on the icon of an iconified CON:-window?

- IPrefs allows now the scaling the image, or centering it, or tiling it. Scaling comes in two quality factors. IPrefs shows all the names of all windows that block the workbench from being closed, making it easier to identify components that are "in the way". IPrefs also reads the configuration for the workbench title string, and the workbench flags, such as windows can be dragged out of the screen.

I am still puzzled by how all this is the job of IPrefs (as in *Intuition* Prefs) rather than Workbench itself.

- SetDate gets a new keyword "FROM" that copies the date over from another file.

As in posix style "touch -r" I presume?
A long time wish-list/request from me would be that C:Date should be able to set system time in a similar faction, from the timestamp of a reference file.

- The CPU command is now able to detect the F6 erratum of the 68060 and identifies the Apollo FPGA.

Huh, do you mean the Apollo Core 68080 CPU? Or can you actually identify which FPGA is used? You are aware that there are at least three different variations of the AC68080? Without any FPU, with "full FPU" (Cyclone V FPGA, V4 standalone), and lastly the more interesting and most common, "limited FPU" (Cyclone III, Gold Core 2.7+ on various V2 and V3 cards). Can C:CPU now distinguish between the different FPU implementations?

- changetaskpri  can now also change the priority of a cli process by name, not only by its "process ID".
- the same goes for "break", which also accepts the name of a CLI process to stop.

One can already do this with back-ticking, for example "break `status command name`", but there is always the problem of many tasks having the same name. What does "changetaskpri" and "break" do when they find more tasks matching the name they are given?

[kolla]

@rxxic:

Well, don't throw away your OS3.9 CD just yet; not every tool will be as feature-complete as H&P's equivalents, so some components from OS3.2 will be better to be overwritten with OS3.9 components.

Such as?

The only components I would perhaps wish to bring from OS3.9, from the top of my head...

* SYS:System/Find - only requires one or two Reaction classes that I presume are now part of OS3.2
* RAWBInfo - same as Find, only requires classes that I presume are now part of OS 3.2
* Unarc - also requires resource.library, which I presume would need to be brought from OS 3.9
* "Ghostbuster" edition of SYS:Prefs/Workbench that allows one to hide NDOS/"Uninitialized" (sic) volumes from Workbench.

Anything else?