[os-infrastructure] Re: [os-engineering] Model discussion boiled down

[Joe Abbate]

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Ross wrote:
> Agreed, VMS makes things interesting. Mainframe even moreso.
>
> Solaris, AIX, HP-UX give us GNU tools, a subversion client, and other
> libraries which means we have a hope of keeping in lockstep.
>
> What do you think our options are regarding VMS? Which would you prefer?
>   

I don't think the decision should be made on what I prefer.  Rather, 
Christine, Deb and others should take a look at the VMS revenue, 
customer base, and other business considerations (like the HP VMS 
Roadmap) and take a decision whether supporting a VMS "community" is in 
Ingres Corp's best interests.   I haven't seen much of a community.  The 
forums only turn up 35 messages with "vms" in them and I suspect a third 
of them are from the old CA forums.  I helped two people build 3.0.x 
(i.e., 9.0.x) from source, on VMS at CA.  One was from the AP and I 
believe he wasn't an actual customer.  The second was someone at a 
Canadian university (Nova Scotia IIRC).

OTOH, I think we still have a, maybe substantial, number of VMS 
commercial customers in the U.S., Canada and Europe which are waiting 
for the GA cluster support release and/or an Itanium migration solution 
(which we're working on).  I do not know what their interests in "new" 
features like Unicode coercion or UTF-8 may be.

Joe