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Chapter 
: Technical and Source-Code Related Issues
What parts will be available in source format? When?
The first parts to be released will be the basic OS, which is the boot loader, IBMBIO.COM, IBMDOS.COM, and COMMAND.COM. Caldera claims that all of the DOS utilities will be made available "as soon as we can get them out of
source control" :-) Apparently, the sources are intact, but in a source control system that is difficult to deal with. Estimates on source size are around 2900 files (53 Mb), plus another 2700 (78 Mb) for tools (until they can reduce the number of to
ols needed).
What about Caldera's other pre-dos products?
They are not included in this process; it is unknown if their sources can be found, much less freed. If they can be found, there's a good chance they'll be freed also, but no promises.
What's the relationship between DJGPP and OpenDOS?
The DJGPP and OpenDOS groups expect to work closely together to "clean up" the OpenDOS sources and integrate the GEM, TCP/IP
, and EMM386 APIs into DJGPP's development kits. While no official arrangements have been made, suffice to say that there will be many DJGPP developers with OpenDOS sources! As for porting OpenDOS to DJGPP, remember that DJGPP doesn't support 16-bit machines, which will be a popular platform for OpenDOS.
What's the holdup on getting sources?
Caldera inherited a weird source control system that all the sources are stored in, and they use an even more weird build system. Getting them "releasable" is a two step process. First is to get all new makefiles written. At last estimate, there
are about 120+ of them. After the makefile for each package is complete, it will be sent back to Caldera for approval. Gene assumes that they will release each package as the extraction/new makefile is done for each, but he's not sure. He really can't pr
edict a timeline right now.
Will the CP/M sources be available?
Gene claims that Caldera will release the CP/M sources when they're found. The problem is that those (and other) sources were sent to an archiving company in Monterey. They're still sorting through the DRI assets, e
tc. trying to catalog and locate things.
What will I need to build OpenDOS?
Each part is built with a different development package. To build everything (once the sources are found and cleaned up), you'll need nine different development packages to build it all. The hope is that this list can be reduced to two or three. The curre
nt list is approximately "Turbo Cv2,v3, BCC v2,v3.1, Watcom C v7, 3 versions of MASM, 2 version of TASM... and a partrid
ge in a pear tree.....", according to Gene! EMM386 is all in assembler.
What are the future development kits?
One, of course, will be DJGPP. The other will probably be some free 16-bit DOS compiler, or maybe someone will make gcc produce 16-bit code finally.
Will OpenDOS be ported to DJGPP?
Well, the core OS can't be (IBMBIO.COM, IBMDOS.COM, and COMMAND.COM) but there's no reason why the utilities couldn't all be 32-bit DJGPP programs. However, that means that a 386 is required, which othe
rwise wouldn't be true.
Where do I get specs for EMM386's extra stuff?
http://www.pobox.com/~ralf contains contains all the API calls for the task interface to EMM386. Gene hopes that better docs will show up eventually. Caldera has found th
e MRS for the EMM386 API docs. See http://www.caldera.co.uk/dos/ for more details.
DJGPP doesn't work!
Make sure you aren't using EMM386's DPMI. Use cwsdpmi instead.