[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Bob Wilson]

On Wednesday, July 22, 2020 at 12:08:21 AM UTC-4, Michael Moroney wrote:
> Bob Wilson <bwandmw at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >There were in fact post-V7.3 full VAX VMS system builds done. It was never 
> >explicitly stated that there would no longer be any VAX VMS releases, so....
> >the build & release team has to make sure that at least the build infrastructure
> >works even though the output is totally broken. We actually were down to
> >"quarterly builds" for that reason.
> 
> >Also *many* checkins were done [by conscientious engineers who maintained
> >facilities that were common between the VAX and Alpha architectures...they/we
> >never got the word to stop] (I got emails for each one, so I can assure you 
> >that there were non-remedial post-V7.3 checkins).
> 
> Emerald, correct? Supposed to be V7.4?
> 
> Wasn't that something that got cancelled as 8.x started to come out, or as
> part of the Alphacide? [killing off VAX as well] Or was it always unofficial?


I did a bit or archeology and without quite a bit more it's kinda hard to develop a time line for what was done when, but...

Yes, EMERALD was to be V7.4 on both VAX and Alpha (though the initial version number assigned when the infrastructure for a release is first set up may or may not be the one that the release ships when it's complete).

V6.2, for both VAX and Alpha, was the first version of VMS where the VAX and Alpha development teams were under the same management, but...the project name for V6.2 for VAX was DRAGON and for Alpha it was ZETA (referred to as the Dragon/Zeta release, or for short D/Z).

V7.0, for both VAX and Alpha (again) the project name for V7.0 for VAX was EAGLE and for Alpha it was THETA (referred to as the Eagle/Theta release, or for short E/T) ... this was the first VAX release that used "build tools on the result disk" (vs. on V6.2 [and earlier], whatever was installed on the running-system [in the cluster] were the build tools (and the only way to figure out what was used was to look at the map and listing files).

V7.1, for both VAX and Alpha (ding, ding, ding) ... started using the same project name for both the VAX and Alpha version, which was GRYPHON

V7.1-2 was a Alpha-only release, project name BLIZZARD (I still have one of the really nice Perry Ellis shirts that they were handing out for that release!)

V7.2 was for both VAX and Alpha and named RAVEN

V7.2-1 (RAVEN_PLUS), V7.2-1H1 (PELE), V7.2-2 (TUTU, don't ask), V7.2-6C1 (COE) ad V7.2-6C2 (COECERT) were all Alpha-only releases

V7.3 was for both VAX and Alpha and named KESTREL 

V7.3-1 (RUBY) and V7.3-2 (OPAL) were Alpha-only releases

n7.4 it get's a little muddy...we cut streams named KESTREL_PLUS and EMERALD_FTn in the same era and without spending a lot of time comparing the times of the base level files [that were checked when the  builds for these releases were launched] it's difficult to determine exactly what happened. In any case, for VAX there were 16 EMERALD_FT1 builds (the last one in Oct 2003), for Alpha there were 9 EMERALD_FT1 builds (the last one in Nov 2001).

Also, on Alpha EMERALD_FT1 was first named KESTREL_PLUS (i.e. KESTREL = V7.3)

Curiously enough, for whatever reason there's a TOPAZ stream/class on the VAX masterpack (n.b. TOPAZ = V8.2) and we built is 7 times (last one Jul 2005).

The VAX and Alpha build and check-in domains were totally separate, an artifact of the way that the Alpha software development team was broken off of the "classic VMS" team. By (before?) V6.2 it became obvious that this was not an optimal situation and the groups were joined...but, by then the Alpha development cluster and the VAX development cluster were completely different physically, but had the same software development setup (e.g. the master packs on both had the same volume labels and the build procedures, though different on VAX than on Alpha, referred to them using the same logical names -- i.e. there were namespace issues that prevented the two environments from residing on the same cluster...so, when VMS development was off-shored and I made a copy of the VAX masterpack I had to change the volume label and give it a different logical name, and why I didn't even attempt to move the VDE stuff from STAR (VAX development cluster) to EVMS (Alpha development cluster)...I figured that the source code would be good enough :-)).

Apologies for the length and pedantic nature of this stuff :-) (context is everything)