RE: Deprecating OS support

[rsbecker]

On October 1, 2022 3:01 PM, Paul Smith wrote:
>On Sat, 2022-10-01 at 14:02 -0400, rsbecker@nexbridge.com wrote:
>> The ITUGLIB project team maintains a port of GNU Make for currently
>> supported HPE NonStop Guardian platforms. We do intend to port 4.4
>> when it is released. I am the official maintainer on the team, at
>> present. The HPE NonStop OSS (POSIX-compatible) platform port is
>> maintained by HPE Development as part of their "coreutils" project.
>> The latter's port tends to lag behind our port.
>
>I'm not familiar with the project names so can you be clear about which
>port(s) are used by HPE NonStop?  Do both of these efforts refer to the VMS
>port?

The NonStop ports would use __TANDEM not VMS.

>In specific, I'm looking at the "VMS" preprocessor variable and all the code 
>ifdef'd
>using that, plus the extra source files such as vmsify.c, vmsjobs.c, etc.  Is 
>this what
>is used by the ITUGLIB project?
>
>Does the NonStop OSS port use these as well, or does it configure itself as a
>standard POSIX-style application and not use the VMS- specific code?
>
>> We do intend to port 4.4 when it is released.
>
>A release candidate for 4.4 was made a week or so ago and a second one will be
>made most likely this weekend.  It would be great if someone could try those, 
>that
>way we could resolve any issues found before the release, rather than after.
>
>However, I realize schedules don't always align so if it doesn't work that's 
>OK.

Timing is a big part of it yes. We cannot use the configure process used by GNU 
Make for various resources, so must manually merge changes into our code base 
and manually modify config.h and Makefiles - at least for the Guardian ports. I 
used to maintain the OSS port but that moved over to a different group some 
years ago. Making it all work is a real pain and takes loads of time. We prefer 
to deal with the official release and make it work afterwards. Our changes 
likely not of general interest (handling weird non-POSIX file names, strange 
system variables, process launch differences) so we have not submitted them but 
they are available at GitHub if anyone wants to look.