[Info-vax] STARTREK.BCK Restore - How?

[Tom Wade]

On 2019-06-12 15:56, Stephen Hoffman wrote:


> Yet I've encountered BACKUP savesets of those VMSINSTAL kits, and the 
> folks mess up that omnibus BACKUP during the transfer.

If you mean taking the VMSINSTAL backup sets (.A, .B etc) and putting it 
into another .BCK and subsequently ZIPping, then yes, I agree this is 
silly.  My preferred way to ship VMSINSTAL kits is to use Backup to 
create the .A, .B etc then put them all into a single ZIP/VMS along with 
a COVER.TXT.  You did, say, however, you saw no need for Backup to be 
involved at all.

Now if only Backup could write compressed savesets as 512 byte fixed 
records (/DATA=INTERNET ?).

> 
> Why should I bother learning a second and platform-specific syntax for a 
> common tool?

OK, it depends on whether you mean as a user of the tool, or the person 
porting it.  As a user, I can go along with that.  If you are familiar 
with using the tools on other platforms, it makes sense to be able to 
continue to do so.  But, similarly, as a VMS user who is used to using 
DCL commands, I would expect not to have to learn an alien way of 
specifying arguments, that is different from all the other utilities in 
VMS, just to be able to use this particular one.  Both requirements can 
be accommodated by making both sets of styles work, as ZIP/UNZIP does.

If you are asking the question from the point of view of the person 
doing the port, I would expect you to make an effort to make your tool 
integrate as well as possible into the target platform, including the 
command syntax.

> ... Slogging through writing and supporting an 
> OpenVMS command parser is extra work.

Which is why tools such as my VMSARG have been written.  This allows 
someone to add on DCL parsing by adding two lines to their existing C 
code, and generating the rest by writing a .CLD file, and a text file 
mapping the arguments into Unix equivalents.  I am sure others could (or 
have) written more elegant ways to do it, but the effort involved to use 
this type of tool is way less than having to write any code involving 
CLI$ routines.

tom dot wade at tomwade dot eu