[Info-vax] New RoadMap out for VMS

[Steven Schweda]

On Oct 2, 6:35 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:

> What surprises me is continued development of both Seamonkey and
> Firefox. Would have thought that they would have focused on one (and
> perhaps port Thunderbird to provide modern email client on VMS).

   What's surprising?  Firefox is IA64-only, and, apparently,
likely to stay that way.  The primary criterion in all this
"development" seems to be to keep some minimal set of paying
victims paying, not to create a product which would attract
any new victims, or even to impress any existing ones.

   My personal complaint, aside from the practical
destruction of the hobbyist program, is the lack of a modern
Web browser on Alpha, combined with a lack of audio support
on IA64.  SWB on an XP1000 is getting to be too slow and
disfunctional to use with sites like the new HP user forum
(disaster), and without audio, an IA64 is not a full-function
workstation, making VMS an increasingly poor primary system
for my purposes.

   The Roadmap item funniest to me was the description of
GnuPG as "continuously updated on the web".  What I see at
      http://h71000.www7.hp.com/opensource/gnupg.html
is still "Download GnuPG V1.4-7 for OpenVMS for Integrity
servers and OpenVMS Alpha  (December 2007)".  The current 1.x
version is 1.4.11.  This must be some new meaning of
"continuously".  Or else they're advertising _my_ GnuPG kits.

   Nowadays, the only real surprise would be actual, serious
VMS development.  I'm not holding my breath.