Open source CLI commands
 

Just saw the warning about not uploading "workbench disks" in the downloads section and thought, what about an Open Source workbench disk? And I was thinking about what things it would need to have on it.

So we're rewriting all the libraries as open source ASM now, but how about the CLI commands in the workbench disk C directory? We need open source versions of these as well, surely, and they should be quite easy to do. Furthermore I suspect they should make for MUCH smaller files.

I can have a go on some of these myself. I got Mr Beanbag to read a directory listing the other day, so maybe I'll start with "dir".

Back in the day there was ARP, the AmigaDOS Replacement Project (or AmigaDOS Resource Project). See http://aminet.net/package/misc/antiq/ARP_13 and http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/ARP_13dev.

ARP was originally intended to replace the BCPL DOS commands of Workbench 1.x with equivalents written in C. So if you were just looking to replace the Commodore commands on boot disks you could look into using the ARP versions. Sadly ARP was never open source though. (Anyone know how to contact one of the former ARP developers? It would be interesting to get hold of the ARP source.)

At one point, some people believed that even distributing a bootable disk, made bootable with the C:Install command, was not allowed due to the tiny amount of code in the bootblock. So there were at least a couple of Install replacements which wrote slightly different code to the bootblock.

Anyway... today there are also the AROS commands which are open source. I haven't tried running any of the AROS M68K commands in AmigaDOS but they should probably work. (But only for Kickstart 2.0 or later.)

Good idea, but if you want something hardest to do, you can try to rework intuition library, or something easiest like layers library or gadtools library. I can give/send to you resourced versions, if you want.

I don't want something hard or I will never bother doing it. I'm terribly unmotivated.

Actually I'd like to write a posix style "ls" command that could be used instead of "dir", the AmigaDos commands have some weird syntax. What do you do, for instance, if you want to copy some files that are actually named "to" and "from" and "ALL"? Argh.

Haven't checked it, but I bet a 'COPY DH0:ALL DH1:' for example will work fine.

yeah that should work, it's more the possibility of doing things you don't want by accident that worries me. Generally seems a bit ambiguous.

Don't really see the problem as 'ALL' is a switch you provide after you specify source and destination. Anyway, if you want to provide replacements wouldn't that require to support the same syntax? Aminet has quite a few alternate commands already, so maybe worth to have a look there first.

one of my all-time favorite AmigaDOS commands is 'ls' which already exists and has since the 80's.. no idea if it's open sauce or where it may be downloaded from, however..

anyway, isn't it just a matter of using the AROS version of the C commands? As far as I know, they should be compilable on AmigaDOS..

Yes, a lot of replacements (most with advanced features) are avilable (most on Aminet) and I use some of that. Also I don`t see a problem with the syntax.

But first what do you exactly mean with "Open Source workbench disk"? Code have to be the only difference? What version?

Version 5...

I suppose the real requirements are, a substitute for Workbench disks on classic, unexpanded Amigas, that aren't bound by copyright restrictions.

I don't look at Aminet as often as I ought.

I got the impression that this is exactly what AROS 68k tries to do. Might be wrong about the project goals though, yet it surely is a starting point.

At 7.9M it's not going to fit on a boot floppy... but maybe I can do something with it. I should actually try this anyway, now you mention it.

I see there are some AROS Shell commands yet to do:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/introduction/status/c.php

Ed... hmm, I was thinking of writing a text editor...
Also, LoadWB, pretty essential for a workbench disk.

Any more news on this? On the FredFish disks there were a lot of source code made available to replacements. Assign, Display, Memacs, Perfmon were provided. Also there were some ports of vi with source if you want to code a text editor