[Info-vax] New RoadMap out for VMS

[Craig A. Berry]

Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> JF Mezei wrote 2011-10-02 20:17:
>> Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
>>
>>> Yes there is. Each page has a lable "Future:" and a list.
>>
>> If you look at most of those "Futures", there are merely ECOs of the
>> existing version of the layered product/middleware.
> 
> It's about 50/50 between ECO's and new features.
> But read it as best fits your purpose, of course.

Sadly, I think JF is right. The roadmaps have been on a diet for some
years, but this one is truly anorexic. The only glimmers of anything
that could really be called new development are support for Poulson and
a very small number of new I/O widgets, and the v8.0 C++ compiler for
Itanium. Everything else in the various "Future" sections look like
modest updates to what's already shipping or work that's long since done
but not yet shipped. For example, IPSEC is in a future section, but as
Richard M. keeps reminding us, that was done and working some time ago
and just hasn't been released.

I think the most ironic page is the one called "Application
Modernization...", which lists a handful of very old and obsolete
versions of some open source packages under the "Future" section. For
example, they project a future release of SeaMonkey 1.1.xx when 2.4.1 is
current.

And then in the "Current" section of that page, the exact same versions
of the same packages, plus a few other packages that have no updates
planned. For example, there are no planned updates to Apache, even
though the one they are shipping now is easily exploitable in ways that
will bring the whole machine to its knees.

>> There is no mention of a new version of VMS.
> 
> So what ? What do you miss ? (I think I asked, didn't I?)

You're kidding, right? How about a modern file system that's not
horribly slow? How about a C environment (headers and library -- not
just compiler) that are actually C99-compliant? How about any of the
long list of items (I think it was 50-100) that were under consideration
a year ago for V.Next? VMS is a great technology, but it has some
catching up to do in a number of areas. Unfortunately it looks like it
will just keep falling further behind if this roadmap is any indication.