[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/27/2019 9:11 PM, seasoned_geek wrote:
> On Monday, April 22, 2019 at 5:45:29 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> A much more useful port would be of Qt 4.8, before QML really
>>> butchered the product. Just the core, none of the GUI because OpenVMS
>>> x86-64 is server only. QML became such a malignant tumor in Qt 5 I
>>> don't think it is possible to root it out.
>> Spending money porting something old and unsupported to VMS
>> seems pointless to me.
>>
> 
> You know, it's really stunning how much you do not know.
> 
> A large chunk of the medical device industry is maintaining 4.8. They will be doing so for
> the next 7 years, probably the next 20 because some devices have a really long life.
> 
> "Maintained"
> 
> That's a word people who know little like to toss about. It's a generic word never actually defined
> because defining it would make it lose appeal to many. They would see it for what it is, buzz and spin.
> 
> "Maintained"
> 
> When people toss out such a phrase what they really mean is new bugs and more bloat. Kewl new
> resource wasting features which have no place in a production system.

Terms as supported and EOL have pretty specific meanings.

When some software goes EOL and becomes unsupported, then the original
source do no longer provide fixes.

For closed source that means no fixes.

For open source that that users will have to fix themselves.

Most serious users try to avoid that situation.

Last Qt 4 (4.8.7) went EOL December 2015.

https://wiki.qt.io/Main

> 4.8 is stable. A small list of known bugs and if you are an active
> member of the community many of those issues have fixes which never
> got rolled into the code base because they were done by people who
> were not among the hallowed few. Other than the massive bloat of QML
> hooks, Qt-core has not changed much between 4.8 and 5.x. In truth, it
> has regressed as certain core aspects are no longer being worked on,
> current owners telling developers to use STL classes instead.
The benefits of open source.

But not very attractive long term to have to search the
community for fixes.

> A port of 4.8 wouldn't require the needless baggage of JavaScript and
> the QML engine.

I thought QtScript was added in 4.3 and QML in 4.7????

Arne