Bugs, Notes, & unresolved Issues

QOMBI (and possibly other programs and utilities)

You may get a Qlib error like Line xxx FDEL: incomplete in SMSQ/E V3.35. Early releases of SMSQ/E V3.35 had a bug where FDEL always returns -1 instead of a zero or a genuine error code. I dont know if it will help to download SMSQ/E V3.35 again or whether you have to wait till the next release. In the meantime just load the "Compatibility toolkit" that came with QOMBI until the issue has been resolved:

where "..qmb_" is the path to your QOMBI directory. Alternatively, get the FDEL command only here and use that instead.

Medium Names

This note is relevant to various programs: HDRen, a utility for naming or renaming QLWA-type hard disks or virtual hard disks; QLWARZ, a utility to resize/refresh QLWA-type virtual hard disks, and QWIRC, my QLWA-type virtual hard disk management program.

The medium name is what you see when you do a DIR or STAT of the medium. In the earliest version of the Device Drivers for the QL (aka DDL1) the convention for naming the medium itself was to enter up to ten name characters at a given location in the root sector of the device and, if fewer, padding the remainder with spaces.

This applied to floppy disks at least, and AFAIK also to microdrives. As of DDL2 a new format of the root sector was introduced for the use of QLWA-type hard disks. Among other things, this allowed for the medium name to become a proper qstring, ie a word length count, followed by that number of characters. Room for the medium name characters was increased to 20. However, in practice, this was never implemented. The old convention was used throughout most of the system, and many important utilities, such as QPAC2 Files, etc, stuck to the unheaded ten character convention. Until recently.

As of SMSQ/E V3.36 the issue has been resolved. Older versions of SMSQ/E, and Qdos/Minerva, may, however, still only display the first 10 characters of the name or trailing remnants of previously longer names that were later shortened.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
- Oscar Wilde