[Info-vax] How to Avoid Old Software, Old Bugs? (was: Re: bizarre SEARCH bug (7.3-2 Alpha))

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-11-12 17:39:25 +0000, Michael Moroney said:

> helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de (Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)) writes:
> 
>> What is strange is that the second "]" is not highlighted.  The text 
>> contains many examples of two of each in one line, and the others look  
>> OK, whether or not there is text between the matching pairs or not.
> 
> Looking through the audit trail, I see a fix in SEARCH.B32 of a problem 
> where  SEARCH fails to highlight some instances of a matching string. 
> November 2005.
> 
> <cue Hoff and old software>


Phillip has dreams of enterprise-ness,

and is making many of the Classic Enterprise Mistakes,

...with hardware configurations ill-suited,

...with little budget to even sustain current use,

...badly-down-revision software and tools,

...with unrecognized dependencies and failures when testing software upgrades,

...the usual and effectively-futile requests for re-debugging old and 
long fixed bugs rather than staying current,

...with failing to test reboots such as arose with the console and the 
issued-but-apparently-forgotten-REPLY/DISABLE and the lack of proper 
OPC$* settings,

...and with no formal support.

This is a microcosm of the app environments at various businesses, 
unfortunately.

==

OpenVMS doesn't make any of this easy, of course.

There are enhancement opportunities in abundance.

The questions interesting to me—and hopefully eventually also to 
VSI—are how to get businesses out of these messes, and how to reduce 
and constrain and avoid these and similar messes.

And then how to get folks to pay for that work, too.

Where VSI decides to invest past the x86-64 port, we shall learn.

But few folks here likely recognize the scale and volume of work 
involved with maintaining a feature-competitive server operating system.

==

There's also the question of whether any future hobbyist program should 
even permit the use of older OpenVMS releases, any preferences and 
objections of the retro-computing folks to the contrary.

Those retrocomputing folks here including Phillip and this ~18 year old bug.





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