From: malmberg@encompasserve.org
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 12:19 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Re: The future of VMS

In article <9f0a9p$162l$1@info.cs.uofs.edu>,
bill@triangle.cs.uofs.education (Bill Gunshannon) writes:

> In an attempt to aid in the continuing existence of VMS, I have
> decided to try and take positive action.  However, I will need
> a bit of information first.
>
> Background:
>    We have a required course for all of our seniors called
>    "Senior projects". :-)  I am considering proposing the
>    porting of one (or maybe two) of the currently popular
>    X toolkits to VMS as potential projects.
>
> Questions:
>
>    Which toolkit(s) would the VMS community here most like
>    to see ported??  GTK??  QT??

GTK has been listed as ported and downloadable as part of the Mozilla
effort.

Does QT still have licence issues that would prevent it's distribution?

>    I currently have available for student use a couple of
>    VAX 4000's and VMS 7.1.  If the porting effort is taken
>    using this base will it be merely a matter of re-compiling
>    to make it work on Alpha or newer VMS versions?

Generally yes, small issues may crop up.

The biggest difference I have found is the construction of shared images.

>    Would people here object to students involved in this
>    project bringing questions here when they get stuck??
>    It is unlikely that any student accepting one of these
>    projects will have any VMS experience at all.

It really depends on the level of the question.  Most of the objections
to student questions that I have seen, is where the student asks for
a complete solution to a trivial problem.

They should be prepared to get all range of answers, good, bad, ugly.

vmsnet.desktop.misc might be a good newsgroup for those working on that sort of
port.

>    For those who may have already ported something from
>    the Unix environment to VMS, is it likely that this
>    project could be accomplished by one or two students
>    in a single semester??

It may be hard to tell.  Some of the packages compile and go, other
ports have numerous features disabled.

Building a portable test/verification environment for a toolkit can
be time consuming.

It might be useful for them to take an existing open-source port of a
project and see if they can enhance it's performance, or reduce it's
resource requirements.

This could get them some good experience with code profiling and testing,
where they could evaluate the merits of which enhancement to persue.

> Any information will be greatly appreciated.  The students
> are int he process of selecting projects for the Fall now.
> If I am to get this going I need to get a project written up
> and posted quickly.

Look at the STAR OFFICE base requirements.  In addtion to the code supplied,
there are other libraries that it seems to need.

Other candiates would be: WINELIB, GCC, SAMBA, MOZILLA, POSTGRESQL, CVS.

Personal Opinion Only
wb8tyw@qsl.network