[Info-vax] Announcing Ghostscript v9.05 for VMS

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-08-08 15:38:12 +0000, hb said:

> On 08/08/12 17:22, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> The chances of getting a CRTL extension within the image headers and
>> supporting code in the image activator (and linker options and
>> command-line tools to configure and manage this header) and the
>> necessary code to retrieve the header settings in the CRTL to fix this
>> DEC C features hackery? Zero.
> This is not a linker and/or image activator problem. All the hackery 
> was invented by the CRTL folks, they should fix it.

Sure it is.  The image headers and the image activator didn't have the 
features that the CRTL folks needed, so the CRTL folks hacked together 
something Really Ugly to get past the immediate requirements.

If the image headers and the activator are not the best spot for this, 
then what's a better fix than an image header extension and the 
associated sys$cli callbacks?

You can't patch a shared CRTL per application, and there's no good way 
to go from the CRTL into the application to rummage around for settings 
there.

If these configuration details are stored in the image header, then the 
context is available for C and (with unique type codes assigned) for 
any other language or tool that might need activation-time settings.

(The FTSV self-extracting DCX stuff already messes around in the image 
headers, but that's another discussion.)


> Whether they ship two different shareable images - a Unix/Posix and VMS 
> variant - or whether they supply (a tool to create) feature enabling 
> object modules or shareable images you can link with/against is all up 
> to them.

Yep.  The original feature logical name design was non-modular mess, 
but then that's been my longstanding position on this matter.

> However, that doesn't change the probability for getting it fixed.

Yep.  Zero.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC