[Info-vax] Open Source on OpenVMS Conference Call - 08:00 EDT 16 Sep 2021

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/10/2021 12:40 AM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <mailman.5.1631235599.20579.info-vax_rbnsn.com at rbnsn.com>,
> <pedersen at ccsscorp.com> writes:
>> The next conference call for the Open Source on OpenVMS community is
>> scheduled for Thursday, 16 September at 08:00 EDT.
> 
>> We hope to have your involvement and participation!!!
> 
> I hope to find the time to participate more in the future, not just in
> the conference call but also actually doing something.
> 
> Something to think about: LaTeX and associated software is used by a
> huge number of people.

Depends on what you consider huge number.

There must be hundreds of thousands of people using Tex/LaTex at
universities particular at math and natural sciences departments.

But there are billions of people using MS Office, LibreOffice,
Google Docs etc..

>                           Much of it was developed on VMS.  (Leslie
> Lamport wrote it while at DEC, but perhaps in Tops-20 and not VMS.  In
> any case, along with (UN)ZIP it is one of the most portable programs.)
> It is still under active development and, amazingly, is better at many
> things than more modern software.  I'm still using a [TEXMF...] tree
> put together by Ralf Gärtner from a freeware disk from a quarter of a
> century ago.  From time to time I've added some missing packages and so
> on, and it is good enough.  However, it would be nice to be able to
> easily update it, or even do a fresh install.
> 
> Two approaches are worth considering.  One would be getting the TeXLive
> distribution to build out of the box on VMS.  The other would be to have
> a minimal distribution which would automatically fetch anything found to
> be missing from a CTAN mirror somewhere.

Pascal or C version of the tools?

Arne