On the plus side for OpenVMS folk, VSI seems at least to have rescued it from total extinction. On the minus side... well, it's still its own beast of a niche system. And while it's not yet dead, and probably won't be for quite some time, I don't think it's existence in a X11 workstation role is a large percentage of its market presence (or that that's likely to change in an upward direction). So, I propose to retire our pretensions of support for it.
ctwm has historically had some level of VMS support, often maintained by sheer stubbornness on Richard's part ;). However, it's different enough from the rest of the world that we'd pretty much need somebody regularly running it to be sure the code kept working. And it has also used a completely separate build infrastructure (and separate pre-generated files for lex/yacc output, etc), which means it couldn't even build to check the code unless that was kept up in parallel too. Which it hasn't been; I'd lay good odds 3.8.2 couldn't even be built without extensive reworking, and I suspect nobody's even tried since maybe 3.8 at the latest. And current head is leaps beyond that. Why bother removing it, as opposed to other ancient platforms we're just quietly allowing to rot? Because it's enormously invasive compared to them; huge blocks of #ifdef make the code harder to read and search through, and there are a lot of other files hanging around purely devoted to it. In preping the retirement, I deleted 19 files completely, that never had anything to do with anything but VMS, in addition to blocks of code removed from the other files. A little wc(1)-age shows a bit over 250k removed; that's more than a tenth of the full dist (including a meg of XPM; count that out, it's closer to a fifth). What's the downside? Well, if somebody ever does want to revive it, a lot of the #ifdef'd code would presumably be needed. I suspect at least some of it and the extra files would be historical cruft even then, but hard to know from where I sit. Having it removed from the current code means anybody wanting to bring it back to life would have to trawl back into the VCS history to recover them, or manually redo it all. Not ideal. OTOH, it being apparently there but thoroughly rotten may not really save them all that much effort, while adding to the load of the rest of us until then. And... well, we HAVE VCS history for those sorts of things. So, between the cost of carrying it, the apparent recent and current non-use, and the lack of expectation of that changing, I think the balance is pretty heavily in favor of retiring it. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise; certainly it's a nice selling point we have against... like, every other WM on the planet (though maybe that says something about its utility). But in the absence of somebody actively using and maintaining the platform, I think it'd take some pretty hard convincing. What say we? -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | [email protected] Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
