[Info-vax] VMS83A_UPDATE V11

[FrankS]

On Dec 10, 12:17 pm, m.krae... at gsi.de (Michael Kraemer) wrote:
> Which is not that far (and increasing) from Mr. Main's
> notorious sermon about "xx patches per month" for the other OS's.

Doubt it, but I'll leave the research to you.

Find earlier versions of OpenVMS, and count the number of patches
released from the date the OS version was released to the point where
patch support was terminated.  Make sure you don't double-count
individual patch kits.  For example, UPDATE kits tend to include older
patches that were previously released, so you must break down the
UPDATE kits and look for unique patch names.

I think what you'll find is that the average-patch-per-month count
decreases over time.  This is what we call "stability", and it might
be a foreign concept for some folks.  :-)

Now, apply the same methodology to Windows or your favorite Linux
distribution.  How you break down something like Windows XP SP2 or SP3
and count unique patches is going to be educational.

You can even exclude patches for layered applications that are not
similarly available in OpenVMS and vice-versa.  That is, don't count
FMS patches against OpenVMS if there is no equivalent on your Linux
distribution, and don't count browser patches against Windows/Linux if
there is no equivalent in your OpenVMS environment.  (Of course, since
the browser libraries are used in many parts of Windows then this
might be a bit unfair, but we'll let it go for now.)

I believe you will find -- as Kerry Main points out repeatedly -- that
the patch count on Windows/Linux is significantly higher than
OpenVMS.  Particularly over the lifetime of a given release number.
You might find it difficult to seperate security patches from general
bug fixes since they may be combined into a single patch.

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