[Info-vax] Where to locate software

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-06-09 18:55:33 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> Sorry Stephen, but I think you have gone a bit too far there. VMS _is_ 
> a competently and well designed system and is damned good with it's 
> traditional workloads.

OpenVMS was very competently designed, and was and is very well suited 
to the era that it originated in, and to the associated applications.   
Doc was great, great networking, very consistent APIs, etc.

In the ensuing years, OpenVMS has lost more than a little of that 
distinction, and for various reasons.   Compatibility was certainly a 
major reason for the complexity, and there are various other factors.   
 Sure, there's still very nice stuff in OpenVMS underneath it all.   
But that isn't what the apps I'm working with are really using, either. 
 Some are — the original code and the old apps — but the new apps and 
the app updates are increasingly using things that are just a hassle to 
work with.  Some — like 64-bit addressing and network security — is 
most kindly referred to as being problematic.  (64-bit was an amazing 
design, alas with the benefits of that work skewed far more toward 
existing applications and not the future and new applications.  But I 
digress.)

OpenVMS app packaging and app installation and app configuration and 
the rest are not well documented — if it's even really documented — and 
the current tools are inadequate, at best.   That's before discussing 
mass deployments and configuration automation and replication, too.

VSI has massive piles of work ahead of them to address and to improve 
the competitiveness of OpenVMS.   If their revenues are established, 
maintained and can trend up, they'll hopefully continue that work.   
App packaging (and related doc) is one of the (many) areas that needs 
work.

ps:   Windows has rolling upgrades now?  Interesting.  That knocks 
another of the distinguishing features off the list.  OpenVMS apps 
could use some help here, though that's certainly part of what's should 
be addressed here — around product installations and upgrades and such. 
 Migrating formats in RMS files can be... entertaining, and that's part 
of why I've been pointing to integrated databases.   This difficulty is 
how OpenVMS clustering got to be as complex as it is — with all those 
shared RMS files, manually referenced via logical names — after all.


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