Request: make coff2omf free

[Walter Bright]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Chmod?  Worth $15?  By itself?? C'mon.  :-)

LOL, maybe not that one! But I kept chmod on after the o.s. attrib 
command helpfully stopped supporting manipulation of some of the file 
attributes.

> As for OBJ2ASM, that one I can believe is worth every penny to someone 
> who actually understands ASM.  But to me it's about as useful as a slide 
> rule.

Obj2asm is a great way to learn assembler. Compile some trivial 
functions with -g, then run obj2asm on the output, which will show lines 
of code and the corresponding generated asm. It won't be long before you 
get the hang of it.

> libunres and patchobj seem to be similar situations.

Those are real handy when you need them, which is fairly rare. I wrote 
them because I had a need for them.

> The rest of the utilities look to be either ports of Unix-like tools 
> (that are available for free from various other sources),  or duplicates 
> of tools that come with Visual Studio (dumpexe/dumpobj==dumpbin).

Try dumpexe/dumpobj - I think you'll find they are much better than 
dumpbin. dumpobj, for example, is especially good at pretty-printing 
dwarf debug info. dumpobj will also pretty-print codeview info - try 
that one with any other tool!

> Or just obsolete (flpyimg? who uses floppies any more?).

I wrote flpyimg just recently in order to back up my (old) floppies that 
had systems on them, to a CD/DVD/hard disk. Just copying the floppies 
skips the system files. Some of my very old floppies are no longer 
readable, so I wanted backups of what I could. You can put a thousand 
floppies on a CD, so there's no issue with storage space.

I learned long ago to keep backups even of obsolete junk, because having 
that old stuff has kept my legal backside out of the fire more than 
once. (I've been accused multiple times of basing my software on ripped 
off code, and every time I've been able to dig up a version that 
*predates* the accuser's development of the product. In one case, I even 
managed to prove the accuser's engineers had based their software on 
stuff ripped off from *me*! That was fun watching their lawyer run away. 
I had one customer refuse to pay me for a big job, claiming that they 
had "rewritten the code from scratch" and so didn't owe. Old backups 
once again showed that their "from scratch" code was about 95% identical 
to what I shipped them.)

Another reason to back up those floppies now is that floppy drives are 
starting to get scarce, especially 5.25" ones.


> So in the end the only thing left that's of any interest to me (and I 
> suspect not just me) is coff2omf.

Most people who buy the EUP do it for coff2omf.

> Thinking about it, it might actually seem like a better deal if you said 
> it was $15 for coff2omf and obj2asm, and the rest of the stuff is thrown 
> in for free.  As it is the web page seems to imply that coff2omf is 
> about equal to chmod in terms of programming effort and is contributing 
> equally to the cost.

It's not about the programming effort, it's about the value in the 
programs. chmod is handy, for example, because it'll give you a 
directory listing including the system and hidden files. whereis also 
ignores those attributes when looking for files, which is nice because 
Windows is always trying to hide important files, like the outlook 
express mail files, which evidently you shouldn't be allowed to back up 
(why I switched to thunderbird mail).

whereis is a very useful utility <g>. You could duplicate it in an hour 
or two, but what's your time worth to you? I use diffdir a lot to do bit 
compares (including hidden and system files) when I build a new DMC++ 
master CD, to verify that only the files I expected to change changed 
(handy when there are thousands of files to deal with). diffdir is a 
lifesaver for that.

> But anyway, after hearing more about the impossibility of successfully 
> groking all purportedly COFF lib files, it seems to me that making DLL's 
> is the best approach.