[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <mj7psk$k0j$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> > I suspect the defaults of "NO" for the "Full Install" was based back in 
> > the days of TU58s or TK50s.  Reading the next saveset takes time....  
> > Today, it doesn't make much difference with DVDs.

DVD?  Hard disk!

> The variant installations date back to the era when everybody had slow 
> systems, tiny disks and glacial tapes.

Right.

> FWIW, as for options and alternatives and variant installations and 
> questions, the more you can remove all of that dreck and provide one 
> installation and one option and one configuration, the better.  The 
> "pick your directory" dchtick and the "pick which subset(s) get 
> installed" are among the worst to deal with, as those options increase 
> the product complexity and the testing effort and the errors for all 
> sorts of code elsewhere in the product --- both for VSI and for those of 
> us with application dependencies --- as that detection and that variation 
> needs to be customized to figure out where stuff was installed, and 
> just what is installed.   How many times did < and > delimiters get 
> mishandled somewhere, after all?

I agree.

> If you really think that there's a need to allow the layered products 
> and the application-private data somewhere other than the system disk, 
> then architect an OpenVMS-wide mechanism that is available across and 
> works consistently across all of the products and all of the tools --- 
> maybe add a third system root in SYS$SYSROOT, for instance --- and update 
> all the tools to deal with this stuff in a consistent and sane and 
> simple fashion.  The existing ad-hoc per-product customization approach 
> is crappy for everybody involved.

I agree.

I don't really see any valid reason not to have all DEC/Compaq/HP/VSI 
software on the system disk.  In the old days, there might have been 
problems with small disks.

What I would like to see is SYS$CLUSTER, so SYS$SYSROOT would be
SYS$SPECIFIC, SYS$COMMON, and SYS$CLUSTER.  The idea would be that
SYS$SCLUSTER is not on any system disk.  There is a lot of stuff which
one wants to be exactly the same for all nodes in a cluster, even if
they have different system disks.  (Different system disks are useful:
for flexibility, reliability, an availability, especially with low-end
systems; for testing upgrades, patches, etc.)  Sure, third-party
software I put on DISK$SOFT, that's OK, but there are things like
customized site-specific files like SYSTARTUP_VMS.COM for which it would
be better to maintain only one copy than one per system disk (or even
one per system root).  Obviously, if a system disk needs a different
version, it can have it in SYS$COMMON, just like a node can have its own 
in SYS$SPECIFIC.  Stuff like SYSUAF could go here as well.

> Corollary: the more you can roll into the base distro, the better.  
> Apache, for instance.

Bad example.  It is a unix port, and it shows.  I would really like to 
have stuff like this optional.  There are web servers written with VMS 
in mind.  Bundling Apache would not be the best thing to do.