Some approachable projects for VSTa

Some folks have wondered privately if there are only big, scary projects
like shared libraries to be undertaken. Not at all! Here's a list of
relatively approachable projects which will still be heartily welcomed
(and are very much needed!):

- Teach the DOS filesystem about date and time stamps for the files and
        directories it creates.
- Flesh out VST'a date/time handling. First thing is to have a program
        which extracts the date/time from the PC's NVRAM. Next is to
        have it massage into a convenient format and feed to the kernel.
- Enhance "ls". It currently only knows how to dump entries within a
        directory. Its output format is questionable. It needs all
        sorts of sorting options. You might want to try porting the
        GNU version of ls instead. You will still have to enhance it to
        understand the protection labels VSTa uses.
- Port any of the file handling utilities. cat, awk, dd, od, sed, pr,
        bc, cal, sleep, sort, col, cpio, tar, etc.
- Port the vim editor. A great clone of vi! Already has code for
        System V-ish systems, so the TTY stuff shouldn't be too bad.
- Test events. I wrote the stuff, but its testing has been minimal.
        Events are the kinda-sorta equivalent of UNIX signals. This
        will probably get you familiar with the kernel debugger! :-)
        They need to be tested for both killing of processes as well
        as event handlers.

                                        Regards... Andy
Received on Wed Sep 1 12:54:12 1993