its its just the "v2/2.0" fork everyone else has been using since forever where 99.99% of the commits were by the amazing Jiří Malák!

If you were using the v2 builds, the announcement is nothing new.

No, I'm fairly certain its not the v2 fork by Jiří Malák but rather a continuation of the original pre-fork codebase. IIRC there was a 2.0 branch in the OpenWatcom perforce repository which I guess was to follow on from 1.9, but it was never finished or saw a release. I assume thats what this is. The folks in the #watcom IRC channel on OFTC are behind it so there has been some discussion about it there, though nothing that I can see since I last restarted my IRC client.

As for what the differences are between 1.9 and this, I have no idea. But asking in the IRC will probably get the answer if there is an answer that anyone knows.

it is the v2 fork, you can see all the commits on their branch are his fork.

See where? I can't find a link to the perforce repository anywhere - I'm pretty sure the web view for that has been gone for a long time now.

Actually downloading the latest V2-fork snapshot and comparing it to the contents of ow_portable_v2_test_build.zip from openwatcom.org its clear they are not the same thing. The format of the version numbers are different, there aren't any 64bit, ARM or Linux binaries, and "lastrev.txt" in ow_portable_v2_test_build.zip indicates the last change was made by MichalN on the 17th of March 2025.

The Open Watcom source is primarily hosted on GitHub:

https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

Releases here:

https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/releases

The older 1.9 branch is still maintained, but in a separate repo (it mentions it is cloned from the original Perforce system). Releases for that are also made independently.

There appears to be some confusion here.

The official Open Watcom project (at openwatcom.org, started back when Sybase released the source code) produced a number of releases up to and including version 1.9. They were working on a 2.0, there was some issue I guess, and Jiří Malák ended up forking and setting up a repository on github where he has continued to develop a fork of Open Watcom v2.0.

Development of Open Watcom v2.0 at openwatcom.org eventually stalled without ever producing a release and the project went silent for a long time, though I believe there was still occasional work in the background by those with access to the perforce repositories. Some time recently some of the people involved appear to have started working more actively on original pre-fork v2.0 codebase and those developers have started (since around the 16th) making test builds of that work available on the official Open Watcom website. That new v2.0 test build from openwatcom.org is what this thread is about.

So there are two different development efforts by two different groups of developers on two different programs both calling themselves Open Watcom v2.0. One is from the original Open Watcom project which was inactive for a long time and now appears to be slowly coming back to life (the topic of this thread), and one is a fork by Jiří Malák which has been in continous development since forking. Without some kind of change log its hard to say what exactly the differences between them are, but they are different. Openwatcom.org isn't just copying builds from github.

Well that's an entirely unhelpful situation.

My install of the Open Watcom v2 fork from Github says:

1$ owcc -v
2Open Watcom x86 32-bit Compilers Driver Program
3Version 2.0 beta Mar  1 2025 02:39:55 (32-bit)
4Copyright (c) 2002-2025 The Open Watcom Contributors. All Rights Reserved.
5Portions Copyright (c) 1988-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
6Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
7See https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2#readme for details.

Whereas that 'next gen' test release from openwatcom.org says:

1$ bin/owcc -v
2Open Watcom C/C++32 Compiler Driver Program Version 2.0beta1 LA
3Portions Copyright (c) 1988-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
4Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
5See http://www.openwatcom.org/ for details.

So they are both badged as 2.0 beta. Great.

The owcc help output / options list is definitely significantly expanded in the Github v2 release compared to the 'next gen' v2 beta from openwatcom.org. It's too long to post here, but there are clearly more optimisation options in the Github codebase.

I really don't understand what is gained by going back to an earlier branch of the code.

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-03-20, 09:40:

Well that's entirely unhelpful.

davidrg gave the best possible explanation

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-03-20, 09:40:

I really don't understand what is gained by going back to an earlier branch of the code.

because these are two completely separated teams (the old team restarting with the old 1.9 and naming their new release 2.0 and Malák who started his V2.0 development years ago)
the teams seems to not share code which is not a very good idea because Malák put so much workload into cleaning up that stuff already for years

llm wrote on 2025-03-20, 10:44:

because these are two completely separated teams (the old team restarting with the old 1.9 and naming their new release 2.0 and Malák who started his V2.0 development years ago)
the teams seems to not share code which is not a very good idea because Malák put so much workload into cleaning up that stuff already for years

That's exactly what I mean; the v2 fork on Github has had years of development, enhancements and bug fixes.

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-03-20, 11:02:

That's exactly what I mean; the v2 fork on Github has had years of development, enhancements and bug fixes.

you need to ask the openwatcom.org developers why they restart that way

ugh what a mess. so openwatcom dont own the github.com/open-watcom user? (I guess I never realised that and thought they did...) esh. anyway, JM's OW-V2 has done so much work i have no intention of shifting off that to whatever the ow.org team is doing. They spent so long not caring about doing any development or public releases I can see it going back to the exact same nothing state. I cant remember but I think i have some old patches I did in JM's tree. OW.org doesnt seem very "open" (or if it is, easily accessable), so I've written them off.

llm wrote on 2025-03-20, 10:44:

because these are two completely separated teams (the old team restarting with the old 1.9 and naming their new release 2.0 and Malák who started his V2.0 development years ago)
the teams seems to not share code which is not a very good idea because Malák put so much workload into cleaning up that stuff already for years

Close - MichalN (of os2museum.com) "started the 'V2' development branch years ago, with the goal of making it more portable and buildable on 'unsupported' hosts", and Jiří forked from there at some point.

At this stage I don't think we really know how much further work MichalN and others have done on the Open Watcom code since the forking. There has been the occasional article on os2museum about it though, eg Retro-Porting to NT 3.1 and Retro-Porting to OS/2 1.0.

BloodyCactus wrote on 2025-03-20, 12:56:

ugh what a mess. so openwatcom dont own the github.com/open-watcom user? (I guess I never realised that and thought they did...) esh. anyway, JM's OW-V2 has done so much work i have no intention of shifting off that to whatever the ow.org team is doing. They spent so long not caring about doing any development or public releases I can see it going back to the exact same nothing state. I cant remember but I think i have some old patches I did in JM's tree. OW.org doesnt seem very "open" (or if it is, easily accessable), so I've written them off.

Correct. I believe all of that was setup by Jiří, much of it after the original openwatcom.org went offline (it only came back online in its current state early last year IIRC).

The difficulty of contributing in the past was in part due to use of perforce - the company behind it gave them free licenses and hosting, but with restrictions. And dropping perforce would have meant needing to find web hosting somewhere else. From what I've heard they plan to setup something else more public though I don't know if a final decision has been made on what that will be yet (maybe github, maybe somewhere else, maybe self-hosted, etc) .

ill be interested to see what they do, but imo, far too little, far far too late. I wish they the best of luck, but i dont see them gaining any traction over the v2 fork.

...and there is not contact information available, no github, discord, not even an email, that itself is very uncommon today

maybe they will release the WGML tool source - the only source that is still missing from the Watcom open source release

that would make a dosbox free build environment possible for Open Watcom V2 itself
the documentation is based on WGML but there is sadly no win/linux port available due to missing source code

Yeah, lack of contact information is not ideal. I don't remember if it was on the previous version of openwatcom.org or not, but the IRC channel is #watcom on OFTC.