[Info-vax] Installing and using GNV - some feedback and questions

[IanD]

On Friday, October 28, 2016 at 12:23:35 PM UTC+11, Marty wrote:

<snip>

> It struck me the other day that use of the LD disks is similar to how "The New Kids" are using the concept of containers and Docker.  Put everything you need to run an app, or a suite of apps, in an LD and you should not have to worry about the underlying OS stuff (as much).

This is how one form of Python distribution is done and it makes it very easy to try out Python without polluting your environment

- Download the two container files (Python and required tools)
- Mount them as LD disks
- Compile (Python compile, required for first build run only)
- Run the setup config (process level or system level logicals / symbols)
- Use

Distributing a release this way makes it dead easy for handling things like ODS5 volumes on older systems were the System disk is still ODS2 because you don't install anything on the system disk and makes version upgrading / testing easy  as they are self contained. 

One place I worked it would have taken months to get traditional software installed because if it touched the system disk the change control process made it unbearable but having the software distributed in an LD device meant most of the objections from the systems folk went away

Container systems such as docker go one step further than what VMS distributions tend to use LD for, which can be just as a glorified saveset with random access ability. Docker distributes a container as a running app with all the files required minus the OS.

Python on VMS is about as easy as it gets for installation with it's two container file distribution but what VMS lacks is a management layer / framework for automated deployment and installation of LD images, it's left up to the VMS admin to manually install / configure, much like bringing a new disk online, not hard but not automatic either which just makes automating a VMS environment harder than it needs to be. Pushing tasks down to the requester level and giving them everything they need to get the job done is where systems have been heading for a long time now

We might even get to a model where VMS can be totally group administered for each representative group / application (I don't think it's entirely possible now is it?, for example, how do you allow say a group manager to run jobs under a username of someone in their group only? You have to give them CMKRNL which allows them access to run under any username on the system. We need a GRPKNL privilege to limit the scope to be group bound)

I guess some enhancements to LD containers might be to make them growable, shrinkable and compressible too, like what you can do with a VM disk