[Info-vax] Autogen

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-02-03 16:01:37 +0000, John Reagan said:

> A long-time VMS developer once told me "anybody with a MODPARAMS.DAT 
> longer than 10 lines is either a genius or a fool"

I recall similar discussions.

It's OpenVMS that often fills MODPARAMS.DAT with cruft, though.

Downside of the just-edit-a-text-file style of management, rather than 
actual tools and APIs for managing configuration files: cruft-filled 
configuration files and with manual reconciliations required.  Because 
there's no framework for this and no configuration file tools, 
everybody rolls their own, and incompletely, and inconsistently, and we 
then get to enjoy the inevitable results.  plists are nice, and yaml 
(libyaml, etc) does very well here.  But I digress.

Going forward, it'd be preferable if the need to tweak MODPARAMS.DAT 
was de-emphasized and indicative of an exceptionally unusual app or of 
an automatic-tuning issue in OpenVMS.  We shouldn't need to do this any 
more.   Not for clusters, nor any other typical configuration.    
Machine Learning is not something I'd expect to see applied to tuning 
here any time soon, but it's where similar requirements are headed 
elsewhere.  Better automation is where we're all headed.



-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC