[FreeVMS] Current status?

[Roar Thronæs]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 09:58:17AM +0100, BERTRAND Joël wrote:
> 
> 	L4 is alive. I have received a patch to avoid a gcc bug but I 
> 	haven't time enough to test it.

Your little time and not finding other people with L4 capabilities seem to be a
bottleneck and showstopper here, for the moment. (5 years now?)

But we should not let that stop the whole project.
We should still continue to develop the user/high-level parts.

I suggest using two parallell paths.

The second being that someone will continue developing from the 0.3.15
release that I was responsible for (but trying to keep away from kernel
parts that in the future will be replaced by L4.
Then at a later stage, do a merge when the L4 part is ready.)

The 0.3.15 release contains features like:
DCL client shell.
DCL utilities copy, delete, directory, search, type,
    show device/system/logical/working_set.
RMS/ODS-2.
RTL libraries with STR$ and LIB$.
Approx. 50 system services.
Essential VMS kernel features for ASTs, event flags, locks, scheduling,
    time support, process control, working set, QIO, mailboxes, logicals etc.
Internet connection with CMUIP.

The last release of something that could be used, 0.3.15, was almost 5 years
ago, and we should reconsider the strategy. 

All we have available now is an image that boots, and says
FreeVMS 0.4.0 (R), and some other lines with the word FreeVMS/VMS, and
then ends with "%RUN-S-STOPPED, PAGER.SYS process stopped", and
can not be used for anything.

That is IMHO many big steps back from the 0.3.15 image with a DCL command
line that could actually do something, and not something that inspires
new people to join and develop.

I will try to get hold of some 0.3.15 image, but currently it is stuck
on some server that has some serious networking problem, so it is not
possible to download yet, but I will come back to this when I succeed.

-- 
Regards,
Roar Thronæs