[Info-vax] Software Distribution Strategies

[Neil Rieck]

On Tuesday, September 6, 2016 at 12:46:00 PM UTC-4, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2016-09-05 14:50, Neil Rieck wrote:
> > The Open Source community has always maintained a (more) open mind to developing software tools targeted at generating production software.
> >
> > For client-server stuff anyone who has ever used jQuery, Bootstrap, Brackets, or AngularJS knows what I am talking about. (all free of charge by the way)
> >
> > For larger projects, tools like "CVS, Git, and Subversion" spring to mind but, truth be told, they always seemed clunky to me (perhaps I wasn't using them properly or perhaps I hadn't got the religion). But the fact that there are multiple tools "might" be an indication there is no good single tool.
> >
> > So when I recently learn that Gentoo is based upon "Portage"
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage_(software)
> > I thought to myself "someone has invented a Rosetta Stone for computer code"
> 
> The Rosetta Stone for computer code?
> 
> Yeah - portage works on *both* Linux and BSD... Same can pretty much be 
> said for the various BSD package managers.
> 
> And all that, of course, means pretty much nothing if we talk VMS. :-)
> 
> 	Johnny
 
Perhaps I should have said "Rosetta Stone for *nix source code". But you are correct, this means nothing for OpenVMS.

:-)
 
Or perhaps almost nothing. The Unix Portability Initiative "web page" is still alive at HP/HPE
http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/portability/
but we all know that HP did very little in this area which was more an initiative by Compaq. That said, everyone here would acknowledge that a lot of code has been added to the C-RTL to make the movement of *nix programs into the OpenVMS ecosystem easier. All those DECC directives are basically ignored going the other way.
 
Meanwhile, the PHP-based tool known as Portage seems (to me) to be a portability initiative in the Linux world.

One thing I read recently is that the Gentoo development team found lots of problems with the way that GCC was built on various systems and so developed some work-arounds which finally made it back into GCC. It seems that GCC is leading the pack (industry-wise) so much so that most C/C++ compilers seem to be playing catch-up to GCC (which means it will come back to OpenVMS)
 
Just my 2-cents worth
 
Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.