[Info-vax] OpenVMS development tooling (was: Re: VSI strategy for OpenVMS)

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 4:50:56 AM UTC+13, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> macOS has the open-source project homebrew, which pulls in some fairly complex 
> recipes with many dependencies, and it typically all just builds.

Unfortunately, trying to do package management via a third party is always going to be problematic, particularly on a proprietary platform. Too much chance of the platform owner simply clobbering your addon installation with its own little organizational changes in some minor update.

And how do you do things like, say, install a newer version of Python, without breaking platform-specific tools that rely on an older version?

> DECset MMS just isn't worth using for app builds.

Which one is the version-control tool? I never used it, but doesn’t it date from the era when checkout locking was considered mandatory?

I started dipping my toes into VCS with Subversion, and then switched to Git. Yeah, it’s quirky, but it’s very versatile.

> VSI will hopefully be releasing a viable CMake as part of the LLVM 
> work.

Interestingly, CMake is best considered as more of a “meta-build” tool. It generates control files to drive platform-specific build tools; e.g. Makefiles on GNU-based systems, Visual Studio project files on Windows, XCode project files on Mac etc.

There seems to be an ongoing proliferation of build systems, e.g. I see new names like “Meson” and “Ninja” pop up these days. Not sure if that’s good or bad ...

> And support for isolating apps from other apps is unavailable, whether 
> for simple collisions of UICs (what a mess UICs have become) ...

No system for dynamically allocating UICs? On major Linux distros, at least, UIDs for users are dynamically allocated from 1000 up, while ones below that are reserved for “system” use, and are dynamically allocated as part of package installation. So, for example, the “sshd” user might get UID 105 on one system, 107 on another, but it doesn’t really matter.