Re: [MiNT] re Martin Eric racine, Guido Leaving?

["Guido Flohr" <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

Hi again!

Just a few clarifications:

I've tried to install a stone-age IBM harddisk (which if fully operable
on Intel platforms), an old Western Digital harddisk, a new IBM and the
Quantum Fireball.  They all fail to work on my TT.  Again: This is _not_
a boot problem.  I can't even partition and format them properly.

And this is neither a MiNT problem:  My MiNT installation is completely
gone.  I booted from floppy (with the harddisk driver on it) into
plain TOS and tried to prepare the harddisk for operation.  

OK, as soon as I have a little time, I will have another try with
the hard drives.  But I'm not very optimistic about that and Saarbrücken
(the place I live) is more or less Atari Nirvana; I don't know anybody
with an Atari round here.

And Martin:  You're very sceptic about new MiNT features.  It's a free
net, that's perfectly alright.  But I rather think that this is a
documentation problem.  Compare it to Linux:  In the Linux scene, highly
inspired developers like Frank and Draco are backed up by a bunch of other
people that do extensive tests and also provide quality documentation (see
the Linux Documentation Project - LDP).  The situation in the MiNT scene
is really different.  Yet, I think that Kellis is absolutely right.  You
can't migrate MiNT into a modern system without the temporary risk of
unstability.  Nobody ever claimed that the 1.15.x kernels are stable.  
The same applied to the 2.1.x and 2.2.x Linux kernels (2.2.x has recently
been considered stable but it is not yet supported by any major
distributor).

Anyway, as for new features:  After I installed minixfs 0.70 I was
so impressed by its performance gain compared to 0.60 that I couldn't
help but send a most enthusiastic mail to Frank for the fantastic
work he's done.  Many harddisk problems I had before had vanished
like magic had been done and for the speed:  I had done a very large
compiler run in directories filled with many, many files.  With 0.60
it took up to 8 hours, with 0.70 the same task was accomplished in
about one and a half hour!  That's what I call progress.

I _never_ experienced any stability problems with the kernel or the
new filesystem.  Well, I neither made use of the new FAT stuff nor
the VFAT stuff because I never needed them.  If you use these new
features (at your own risk) and they don't work, turn them off or
fix the problems yourself.  Might sound a little harsh, but that's
what you're expected to do when you use (and profit from) free 
software in alpha or beta stadium.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
http://stud.uni-sb.de/~gufl0000
mailto:gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de