Table of Contents:
1.) New and/or improved pipe implementation. 2.) New and/or improved system() and backticks implementation. 3.) ODS-5 filename support. 4.) Support for the C++ compiler. 5.) Evaluate building with Configure under GNV rather than configure.com under DCL. 6.) Evaluate porting the pthread-based Win32 pseudo-fork. 7.) Signal handling improvements and fixes. 8.) Port Test::Smoke to VMS. 9.) Enable support for new CRTL functions in VMS 7.3-x. 10.) Support ODS-5's POSIX volume characteristics (e.g. access dates)
And more details on those items:
1.) New and/or improved pipe implementation.
See socketpair(), which is expected to be available in VMS 8.2 with several open source alternatives available for older versions as a substitute.
The downsides is that this requires a TCP/IP program at runtime and the build option to include it.
Something I'll also mention here that John Malmberg told me about off list. We have a lot of automatic variables that are used for temporary filename storage; if we switch the lengths on them al from NAM$C_MAXRSS to NAML$C_MAXRSS (255 --> 4095), we will probably, based on John's experience with other packages, blow up the stack on a regular basis. We'd also have to switch them to malloced storage instead of stack variables.
This would affect builds using POSIX threads. With POSIX threads unless you specify otherwise, you only get a small per thread stack. The sizes are different on Alpha and VAX, and probably IA64.
9.) Enable support for new CRTL functions in VMS 7.3-x.
The version dependency tables in the CRTL manual show 5 new functions for v7.3, 19 new functions for v7.3-1, and 47 new functions for v7.3-2. Some of these, such as nanosleep() and poll(), we've added support for, but we really need to do a thorough review to see if there's anything there we should be using but aren't.
And more to come with 8.2 EFT which is currently now shipping. Documentation is on the OpenVMS web site.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/os82ft_index.html
10.) Support ODS-5's POSIX volume characteristics (e.g. access dates).
We should look at our utime() and stat() implementations (and perhaps others?) and do what the CRTL does when there are extended volume characteristics available.
With 8.2, I am expecting that the stat() structure will become fully POSIX compliant, and that means that the dev_t and the ino_t definitions will change on 64 bit systems built with that option.
Is there any reason to continue building an option with or with out TCP/IP? The TCP/IP routines are present in the CRTL even if no TCP/IP product is installed. They just return the appropriate error code if there is no TCP/IP routine.
-John [EMAIL PROTECTED] Personal Opinion Only
