Re: [patch] tar.1.19 changes needed for VMS so far.

[John E. Malmberg]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hello John,
>
> * John E. Malmberg wrote on Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 07:01:46AM CET:
>
> > In tests/testsuite :
> >
> > VMS can not deal with having a file/directory named testname and  
> > testname.dir in the same directory.
> >
> > This is because all directories are named .dir, and to be more POSIX  
> > friendly, VMS hides the ".dir" part of the directory when using UNIX 
> > syntax.
> >
> > So testname and testname.dir appear to be the same filename when  
> > testname.dir is a directory.
>
>
> Can you do something like a VPATH build on VMS?  Because then, then
> testsuite script should live in the source tree, and the testsuite.dir
> and testsuite.log will be in the build tree.  (At least in packages
> other than Autoconf itself.)

First I would need to find out what a VPATH build is.

Currently on VMS, I have a logical name which behaves a bit like a mount 
point with multiple directories overlayed.

My default is /prj_root which causes file lookups to first look in 
/lcl_root and then in /src_root.  /src_root is read only.

> > I can not automatically run the test suite because I do not have  
> > Autotest, and even if I find a tarball for it, I am not sure that it  
> > will run on VMS.
>  
> Autotest is part of recent Autoconf.  I remember there was a VMS port of
> Autoconf but I do not know how current it is.

The Autoconf port is incomplete and was done to assist building e-macs.

To get autoconf to work on VMS requires some more updates to Perl on VMS.

Right now, perl 5.10 on VMS is failing because it is unable to unpack a 
tarball that perl creates, and that is something I am trying to fix 
before putting the other fixes into Perl on VMS.

As a work around, I have the /SRC_ROOT NFS mounted on a LINUX system 
that I run the autoconf step on.

-John
address@hidden
Personal Opinion Only