Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

In message <address@hidden> on Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:00:21 -0800, Larry Hastings 
<address@hidden> said:

larry> After all, and /please/ correct me if I'm wrong, I understand
larry> that VMS has been on its way out for years.  (Truthfully, I'm
larry> surprised that folks are using bleeding-edge software like
larry> monotone on something as, well, /non-/bleeding-edge as VMS.)

OK, I'll correct you, quickly and swiftly.  VMS is very much alive and
has actually gotten a development boost lately.  It's been ported to
Itanium, with version 8.0 being the first that ran on that iron.  The
latest release is 8.2 with 8.3 coming around the corner.  Quite a lot
of open source has been ported to VMS, some key ones (like Mozilla,
Apache and some of OpenSSL) by HP themselves, with a lot else by
others (like yours truly).

Speaking of the file system, there are actually two current ones on
VMS.  They're called ODS-2 and ODS-5 (ODS = On Disk Structure or On
Disk System, I forget which).  ODS-2 can be considered antiquated, but
is still in active use on many installations, simply because many are
used to it and not entirely ready to embrace the newer structure yet.
A dotfile style directory isn't possible on ODS-2, but it *is*
possible on ODS-5.

VMS, on its way out?  Gimme a break!  Yeah, it's a very carefully
designed system, and it isn't as bleeding edge as constantly updating
your Debian [unstable], but then, HP's biggest customers are things
like the military, banks, hospitals and so on, who all depend on their
system being reliable, and VMS has a very strong (and deserved, IMO)
reputation as a 24x7 system.  If you want to stay with that kind of
reliability, you can't be "bleeding edge".

However, for individual sites to want to use a good SCM (and I do
consider monotone to be among the best if not the best that I've
tinkered with so far) can't be wrong, even if that SCM is considered
bleeding edge and they otherwise run on a platform that isn't
bleeding.  After all, I'm sure some run monotone on a Debian [stable],
which I would consider very non-bleeding edge as well.

larry> One possible solution would be a mtn command that prints the
larry> basename of the bookkeeping directory on the local computer, so
larry> that scripts can ask for it by name.  Thus a well-written
larry> script could run unmodified on VMS.  A poorly-written script
larry> could get diffs from people who care ;)

You know, I actually like that idea.

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including
 the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
                                                -- C.S. Lewis