[Info-vax] HDF5 going going, perhaps soon gone from VMS?

[John E. Malmberg]

On 8/19/2015 4:21 AM, Dirk Munk wrote:
> Dirk Munk wrote:
>
> Supplying groups like these with free VMS Itaniums is a bit difficult.
> But couldn't VSI set up an online software development server for
> projects like these? VSI could set up a complete environment for HDF,
> set up accounts etc. as a kind of service. They could offer some support
> for VMS specific questions etc. Projects returning or staying on VMS is
> always good news I suppose.

HP has(had?) an open source cluster with free access set up for this 
already.  I have not used it for a while because the latency to India 
was too high, and I currently can not reach it.

Free Alpha emulators are also easily available.  And most Alpha source 
will just build and run on Itanium.

The issue is that for VMS support, you need at least one VMS advocate 
dedicating significant time to do testing and development.

You will find that every other OS supported by an open source project 
has at least one maintainer active on the support forum for it.

In the case of Python 3.6x future VMS support being removed that was 
brought up last year, several VMS people on the python indicated that 
they wanted to help.

I set up a cpython repository on vms-ports and did some test builds of 
the development cpython with the VMS support removed.

I had to make some updates to the GNV LD/CC wrapper to get the basic 
build to work, and was able to get the python interpreter building, 
running, and also got most of the dynamically loaded extension libraries 
working.

And most of the stuff that is on my todo list to get things completed 
appears to have never been done for the existing VMS port of Python 
2.7.x, and are blocking me from using Python 2.7.x for some personal 
projects.  Until that can be fixed, I have to use a Linux host.

None of the VMS people on the Python list have responded to the posts 
that I had a build procedure set up.

The build of Python 3.x only has some very small modifications to the 
existing python code, and those have been submitted as non VMS specific 
patches.

With the updates to GNV, instead of trying to maintain manual edits of 
the upstream library, we are using first include files and supplemental 
libraries to the CRTL as the preferred method, and if a source change is 
needed, a TPU script is used.  Bash needed that.

This allows us to build a current Bash, coreutils, grep, sed, with 
minimal effort when a new release comes out.

See the "Conference Call" thread, if you can make the 23:00 EDT time on 
Thursday.

Regards,
-John