Subject: Re: pbmplus and emm386 noems
To: aml AT world DOT std DOT com (Andrew M. Langmead)
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 1994 18:49:06 -0600 (CDT)
Cc: mcastle AT umr DOT edu, djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
From: mcastle AT umr DOT edu (Mike Castle)

Amazingly enough Andrew M. Langmead said:
> 
> Mike Castle said:
> > would work.  However I did not know this at the time I ported the
> > package, and therefore is undocumented.  
> 
> That's funny. I new that p?mmerge would take the name of the tool to
> execute as the first name on the command line (by reading the pbmplus
> documentation) , and immediatly set up a few dozen batch files to call
> p?mmerge appropriately. I know that these batch files are rather
> wasteful of disk space. (a few k of disk allocation for only a dozen
> bytes each) but it seemed like the more efficient than 4dos aliases.
> (It didn't seem worth it to waste 4k of base memory just to
> be able to call the same program dozens of different ways.)

Heh.  When I said "undocumented," I meant in my readme.dos file.
I HAD known about that feature of p?mmerge, but since I never
used it, forgot about it.  I remembered it long after I'd released
the package.

> I don't think of these batch files, or even renaming the file, to be a
> hack around DOS's lack of symbolic links, I think of p?mmerge as a
> hack around operating systems that don't have shared libraries.

Perhaps.  But it also saves inodes on truly space stressed
systems.  (picking nits, I know ;-).  Actually, the OS/2 port of
PBMPlus did use the shard library approach.  Each of the
appropriate *.a file was changed to a dll, and each executable
was made to load that dll.  As a result, each executable was
around 3-4k in size (if I remember correctly).  Perhaps when
DJGPP 2.0, complete with DLL's, come out, such a similar port
could be done.

mrc
-- 
Mike Castle .-=NEXUS=-.  Life is like a clock:  You can work constantly
  mcastle AT cs DOT umr DOT edu     and be right all the time, or not work at all
   mcastle AT umr DOT edu       and be right at least twice a day.  -- mrc
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen