[Info-vax] GNV

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/21/16 9:22 PM, John E. Malmberg wrote:

>
> PCSI has several issues.
>
> 1. It does not fully understand ODS-5, even the versions that claim to.
>   It kind of works if you are lucky.  Assuming that it does not support
> ODS-5 at all makes installations more successful.

ODS-5 comprises multiple features. I'm not sure which features you've
had trouble with, but I don't recall having problems with case
preservation or filenames with extended characters in them, or multiple
dots. Assuming you're using one of the later ECOs of PCSI on 8.3 or 8.4.

> 2. It does not really understand that you can have multiple disks to
> install on.  It assumes that it is installing on the boot disk and that
> the /destination disk is the boot disk.  So it does not know to put
> stuff in SYS$HELP: and SYS$STARTUP that it should.  Or VMS does not know
> enough to have SYS$HELP: and SYS$STARTUP be search lists for all the
> volumes that PCSI has installed things on.

I don't bother with more than one disk very often, so I don't know what
trouble that causes.

> 3. PCSI kit builder knows that all files with the same name have the
> same content regardless of what directory they are found in.  So if you
> have a [.vms]readme. and a [.linux]readme. file, PCSI kit builder will
> grab one of them at install time and use it for both copies when doing
> the install.

I think you are right that it did have this bug at one time. So did MMS,
IIRC. But I've not had this problem recently. A recent Perl installation
has five instances of "File.pm" and three instances of "file.pm" in
various directories, and I haven't seen PCSI get confused about which is
which.