Q: The above table means that I need more about 20 MBytes for
C/C++ development environment; that's about 7 1.44MB diskettes to
hold even the compressed archive!! Seems to me DJGPP is afflicted by
the fatware disease....
Q: Pulling that many megabytes through the net from my overloaded
SimTel.NET mirror is almost impossible. Can't you prepare a ZIP archive
which only includes stuff I can't do without?
A: There are a number of shareware/freeware programs floating around which allow formatting DOS diskettes to almost twice their usual capacity, so you can use less floppies. One such program is 2M.
Also, with the proliferation of drives that can burn CD-ROMs and the availability of high-capacity removable media, like Zip drives, using floppies is no longer the only solution for a movable DJGPP.
To make downloading DJGPP easier, download and compile the
BatchFTP program. It allows you to submit a script of FTP
commands and will repeatedly try to login into the FTP site you specify
until the script is successfully completed. It is smart enough to
understand the messages which the FTP server sends to you (like
login refused etc.) and also is nice to the remote server by
sleeping for some time between login attempts. BatchFTP is free
software and can be found on many FTP sites.
BatchFTP is a Unix program; those who access the net from their
PC (not by dialing into some Unix host with a shell account), can use
one of the available programs for automated FTP access.
As for the minimal DJGPP installation, volunteers are welcome to
prepare such an archive and make it publicly available, in the same
spirit as EZ-GCC did for DJGPP v1.x.