[Info-vax] Logging systartup_vms.com progress to operator.log VMS 7.3-2

[geze...@rlgsc.com]

On Wednesday, October 14, 2020 at 8:39:52 PM UTC-4, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2020-10-15 00:27:21 +0000, geze... at rlgsc.com said: 
> 
> > The dependency problem can be managed. Enabling/disabling things in 
> > STARTUP_VMS.COM is often the source of problems when people make 
> > editing errors.
> The dependency problem I'm referring to and that we've discussed some 
> years ago was with sequencing the startups among various products 
> automatically adding their own startups during product installations, 
> as the scheme as originally architected was found less than entirely 
> workable.
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC
Hoff,

Yes, that is a conversation that we have had. STARTUP.COM has a number of shortcomings. Could certain choices have been advantageous? Certainly. Could it have been documented better? Without a doubt.

WADR to those who worked on it, I would love to hear the rationale for certain choices. Why was network startup special cased, rather than being added to one of the existing, or a new, phase. 

In the enhancement category, the use of the filename to identify a database entry was poor,. The filename should have been an overridable default (e.g., one might need to execute the same basic files with different parameters on the same node).

Those shortcomings noted, one can work around the deficiencies without an excessive amount of effort. I have done so on many occasions. 

Being able to automatically spawn several tasks in parallel has been a great benefit on more than a few occasions. Being able to start a batch job from the startup sequence is also an advantage. The lack of automatic dependency mechanism is a problem, but it is not difficult to create a workable interlock (using a logical name table). The number of phases is easily corrected, as I mentioned earlier in this thread. Startup sequences are not normally high entropy, so the lack of tooling is not an excessive nuisance.

Could STARTUP be more friendly? Certainly. However, IMHO, it is better than manually hacking the SYSTARTUP_VMS.COM file.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com