[Info-vax] problem with LSE installation

[clairgrant71 at gmail.com]

On Sunday, May 17, 2015 at 10:00:01 PM UTC-4, David Froble wrote:
> clairgrant71 at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > A common set of sources is used to build VMS Alpha and VMS Itanium
> > and we will be adding x86 support to that code base. We are not
> > planning any Alpha releases but any nonarchitecture-specific changes
> > will be in both VMS Itanium and VMS x86 releases and we hope there
> > will be many of both.
> 
> Ok, feet to fire time ....
> 
> :-)
> 
> So, you have a common code base.  At some time you make changes, or add 
> something.  Will the code base then fork?  If not, then it seems your 
> only recourse would be to issue something, patches, new version, 
> whatever, for all three, and if you wished, and it fit, VAX too.
>

There is not forking. It is not "our only recourse" it is in fact "our stated goal". For example, let's say we find a bug or come up with a performance improvement in PAGEFAULT.MAR. We check it in, build a new SYS$VM.EXE for Itanium and one for x86 and test them. The next release for both architectures will contain the change. That is what we want. VSI will not be shipping Alpha releases but the HP VMS Team can pick up the change and ship it as an Alpha update. There is nothing new here. This is what we always did with Alpha and Itanium in the past; x86 just gets added to the mix.
 
> Assume that the modifications are non-compatable with earlier versions, 
> and Alphas could not remain in a cluster without the new stuff ....
> 
> What then ?

Backward compatibility is a cornerstone of VMS development. Breaking cluster compatibility won't happen.