[Info-vax] RMS record metadata, was: Re: Re; Spiralog, RMS Journaling (was

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-06-21 14:16:50 +0000, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com said:

> Of these, none is worth keeping. Except maybe that last one.

Your list missed one: if RMS is ripped out, then large chunks of 
OpenVMS itself and more than a little third-party and end-user code 
either gets rewritten. or an RMS analog layer gets written.  That 
latter approach and that latter effort goes nowhere near forward 
progress, either.  There are a lot of RMS system service calls around 
in VSI and third-party and end-user source code, and a lot of source 
code with in-built RMS-based assumptions.

That application rework and rewrite take decades, and there needs to be 
a much better alternative in place and available for that level of 
effort to even be remotely acceptable by users.  And anything less than 
a decade or two for the ensuing application migration — to that overtly 
and massively better alternative, and that obviously-better won't be 
even remotely easy to design, build, market and sell — will not be 
acceptable.

There are good alternatives to RMS for many tasks (and there's a 
massive fodder available here to add and improve what is available), 
but reworking and redesigning end-user source code at this scale for 
use new and different APIs is usually considered to be somewhere 
between an extensive rework, a rewrite or a wholesale platform port, 
and not something part of an upgrade.

More than a few giblets around — even in OpenVMS itself — still have 
ODS-2 assumptions, and how long as ODS-5 been available?

Would I toss specific and problematic and targeted hunks of OpenVMS 
out?  Yes, just as soon as better replacements are available with a 
migration path, and with a sufficiently long migration window ahead of 
deprecation.  Would I consider tossing RMS and its APIs out the 
airlock, if starting over with a wholly new NuVMS operating system?   
Certainly.   But nobody here is building or rebuilding NuVMS, and 
OpenVMS can't toss RMS.   Not in any reasonable timeframe.  If ever.   
Not without encouraging folks to migrate completely off of OpenVMS, for 
that matter — and that's assuming that the hypothetical NuVMS and its 
new RMS alternative really is much better.



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