[Info-vax] Unix tools on VMS, was: Re: September 6, 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now on VSI website

[Chris]

On 09/11/16 17:16, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk wrote:

>
> Top marks for the DECUS reference. Anybody here *not* know that
> the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society formerly distributed
> a variety of free tools intended for use with the various DEC
> operating systems? Everything from games to utilities to compilers
> and more.
>
> After there was DECUS, and specifically for VMS, there was VMS
> Freeware.

Still have decus 1/2" tapes somewhere and some of the freeware
cdrom distros as well, all open source in it's day.

>
> Where's that these days? A quick search seems to led to a maze
> of twisty little websites, all different.

That's why VSI need to get the infrastructure in place to support
the package model, then the rest will follow. Just trying to do
it piecemeal is inefficient and not a long term solution.

>
> It's the same kind of logic that makes the Cygwin and MinGW
> fake-UNIX environments interesting to some people whose world
> is mainly centred on Window boxes. Cygwin and MinGW aren't
> perfect, but for many people they're good enough for some
> important things.
>
> If only there was some kind of natural affinity between VMS
> and NT, so that Cygwin and/or MinGW could be trivially ported
> to VMS... ouch, I've gone a bit recursive, and worse, invoked
> memories of Wollongong Eunice (a BSD4.x environment that ran,
> like a dog, on VAX VMS in the V3.7 era)... sorrrrrry.

Have sorry memories of Wollongong TCP/IP, but anyway :-).

Cygwin is very mature now and I use it every day of the week, with
Cygwin X running as well, to support an old favorite motif based
programming editor.

Of course, another way to solve this problem would be to have a
virtualisation layer, Zen or similar. Then you could host any os
you like, while still  having the robustness of VMS at core...

Chris