[Info-vax] Updated HPE/VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2L1 Marketing Brochures

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-10-01 17:44:40 +0000, Kerry Main said:


> An LD approach like Perl is pretty brain dead simple. Create/mount the 
> LD drive and update the startup file.

We'll have to disagree.   Sure, swapping in another set of LD images is 
easy.   Dealing with upgrades, finding where the bits installed 
particularly when there are now multiple independent LD images, there's 
the effort involved in migrating files and such forward across 
upgrades, stuff that's not so easy.   And it's a whole 'nother 
installation ad upgrade mechanism, when the existing OpenVMS VMSINSTAL 
and PCSI mechanisms are limited at best, and where timely notifications 
and such are entirely out-of-band, and processing entirely manual.    
So now we have a second approach which works differently — simpler in 
some ways, but worse in some others — than the one we have, with no 
particular means of locating and isolating and identifying dependencies 
and incompatibilities, and with all sorts of fun around logical name 
redirections and/or finding libraries or just figuring out what's 
installed when something else installs, and either requiring a new or a 
manual cryptographic checksum if there's any requirement for 
assurance....   The existing utter morass is enough of a prob.... um, 
has more than enough room for improvement, and that's without adding 
distro-by-LD.   But I give up....



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