On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 01:32:02PM +0200 I heard the voice of Richard Levitte, and lo! it spake thus: > > With this in mind, I'd say that the VMS code should be taken out... > however, it might be good to keep it around somehow, for reference > or just in case someone is interested in working with it. In a > separate branch, maybe? Granted, that branch will get moldy after a > while, but still...
Well, up through 3.8.2 we still have the ostensible support (though I don't know when it was last tested; 3.8.1 or 3.8a maybe?). And I'd certainly drop a tag in the VCS history before it's dropped. Not sure how we could maintain a branch of it going forward though; either it would be unchanged (and thus just another name for the tag), or we'd be trying to merge forward changes into it, which would be the same work as just keeping it in trunk. I suspect that either way, the rate it rots would mean that if we let it sit untouched and in the future somebody wants to get it back going, they'd either have to fork from back now or a little before when it already mostly worked, or essentially re-port it near from scratch. So unless somebody winds up picking it up pretty soon, it doesn't save them much trouble to leaving the hoary remnants in :| Kinda sucks, saying goodbye; it's nice to be able to say "Sure, yeah, we run on that". But as things are now, it's pretty near a net loss as soon as it makes somebody spend a couple minutes verifying a change against it. And without an engaged maintainer it doesn't even help the VMS guys when they try since it'll probably be broken. I sorta wonder how many VMS workstations being updated there are anyway; I suspect most remaining installations are using it in bigass-server role, and they don't have any need for us... -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | [email protected] Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
