[Info-vax] Installing VMS Pascal on AXP

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-07-28 16:07:45 +0000, John Reagan said:

> That's odd.  It didn't do that for me.  ... The fact that we compiled 
> several PAS files into PEN files before the crash makes it feel like 
> some sort of quota issue maybe?

Entirely FWIW...

I have fixed myriad weird app crashes by adding explicit app startup 
quota checks enforcing the minimal process quotas within the tooling.

If the current process settings don't meet the minimums, and don't 
approximate the expected ratios (for cases where ratios might exist 
among the quotas), the app prints a message and exits.

With a few of these cases, the tooling went further and detected 
newly-added users with insufficient values and automatically fixed the 
incorrect quotas overnight. But that's not an option here.

Caveat: There was a case where this check-and-fix design went awry many 
years ago, with the DECwindows startup. IIRC, there were two sources of 
quota truth in that case (oops), and only one had been updated. (nb: 
not my bug.)

Defensive programming on OpenVMS usually involves quotas checks, system 
parameter checks, the expected and required settings for the DECC$ 
logical names, having had the app-required startup previously run, and 
other such.

These checks have fixed massive numbers of bug reports, and have made 
the apps much easier to maintain.



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