[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[Paul Sture]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2012 21:17:45 -0400, David Froble wrote:

> Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>
>> VMS as it stands simply could not do the smartphone job I mention
>> above.

...

>> The merit of Unix is that it's designed to be portable unlike VMS.

<Other good stuff snipped for brevity>
 
> Not sure how to get my point across.
> 
> Most of what you write isn't about the relative merits of VMS vs Unix,
> but about Unix being available, low cost or free, sort of portable, and
> such.

A large problem is that for a long time VMS hasn't been getting new 
features that are now standard on other operating systems.

Off the top of my head, shortcomings posted recently here in comp.os.vms:

o - no Unicode support
o - no automated patch installation system
o - no IPsec
o - limited LDAP, connectivity to Active Directory etc
o - woefully out of date ports of things like bash and Apache
o - PRODUCT INSTALL and related stuff could do with a major rethink

Compare PRODUCT INSTALL with the example I have of installing bsdtar on 
openSUSE (I picked openSUSE to demonstrate the 'cnf' command, which is 
very useful in its own right):

http://www.sture.ch/node/220

Note that a package signing key is included.  As it happens, no package 
dependencies were found for bsdtar, but if they had been, those packages 
would have been downloaded and installed as well.

And before you ask, given the doubt about the package signing key in my 
example, my next job is to check its validity :-)

-- 
Paul Sture