On 12/23/24 7:12 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
Just got an end of the year update from VSI, which was pretty routine
apart from one item.
VSI are talking about releasing a new version of GNV but I thought this
had long since become an external project hosted at SourceForge.
I checked the VSI website and they appear to have a single download of
the base kit, but only for Itanium, and which is located at:
https://vmssoftware.com/products/gnv/
So, is GNV a VSI or external project these days ?
Both and neither. GNV originated within Compaq/HP(E) (possibly as part
of the COE project?) and the wrapper that more or less emulates the gcc
command line with DEC/Compaq/HP(E) C is still a pretty close cousin of
what those folks built. That is one example, but most other parts also
started with the vendor. Other people (mostly Eric Roberston, John
Malmberg, and Bill Pedersen) have taken individual pieces quite a bit
farther than anything that was coming out of HP. I'm hoping some of
those folks will chime in and correct/extend my comments.
At one point the advice was to avoid the complete installation because
what it did with the POSIX root could corrupt your system disk and you
didn't really need the POSIX root to run Unix utilities. I believe that
may have been fixed at some point. No one has released a complete
package with up-to-date components in many years. I have not seen any
new releases of individual pieces in several years either.
What the vendor has provided over the years has been a very mixed bag.
I saw a presentation while the engineering group was in India that had
a slide listing all of the new and updated components that were to be in
the next version of GNV. There were about 60-80 as I recall. But none
of those things ever appeared. Maybe the HP(E) lawyers read the GNU
license, or maybe someone (belatedly) did some quality control and
realized the stuff that had been "ported" was nowhere near ready to
ship. So prior efforts are not necessarily things to emulate.
VSI certainly needs a porting capability for code written elsewhere. I
have heard rumors of CMake for some years now but don't know the status.
Having updates to bash and GNU make and any utility likely to be used
in a configure script would be nice things to have. But the CRTL has
improved a lot in the last few years, with (finally) complete C99
support, etc., so probably none of the existing ports would look the way
they do if one were starting today.
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