[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-04-30 11:28:47 +0000, IanD said:

> Master Hoffman, if someone of your skill and expertise around VMS found 
> debugging and tracing root causes of VMS failures at times challenging 
> or probably more to the point, more tedious than it needed to be, then 
> I don't feel quite so stupid! Many a times I was left scratching my 
> head and it was more experience that led me to the root cause than the 
> tools and logs leading the way (That was meant as a compliment to you 
> btw)

OpenVMS crashes can range from the obvious to the intractable.  As can 
some app crashes.

OpenVMS itself is also tedious to deal with around the inevitable 
debugging and crashing of apps that I'm developing or updating, as 
compared with other tools I work with.

In recent years, new app design and development starts with the data 
security and encryption and authentication requirements, then with 
designing and building or borrowing the debugging framework(s) that 
will be used for the app, and then implementing the app around that.  
Same general pattern for substantial updates and overhauls, and I've 
had success retrofitting logging and debugging support into a number of 
apps.

Next step after that is automating the deployment.  Then the 
verification of what's deployed, both for pushing new patches, and for 
detecting corruptions or malicious changes.

For some semi-related details around kitting and deployment for OpenVMS 
itself, see the VMSKITBLD.XML file.

> To even have something with some of the functionality of the windows 
> event logging mechanism would be good.
> I realise there's lots of work to be done with VMS to drag it forward, 
> I just hope a unified standardised logging mechanism is somewhere on 
> the radar or do we just go down the reboot to fix it path and spin up 
> another virtual server and get on with it. I really hope not!

Apple started out with integrating multiple logs and disparate logging 
into a single app a while back (q.v. macOS Console.app), but has 
recently started to replace that approach with a centralized stream log 
service that can be searched and sorted.  In recent macOS releases, see 
man log for details.


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