Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x

[Antonio Carlini]

On 21/04/2021 22:13, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote:
> I've just tried ANALYZE/DISK on VAXBINMAY931 which is the oldest I can
> put a hand on right now and it gives exactly the same output as you got.
>

Thanks ... that's reassuring. Individual savesets can be tested with 
BACKUP/LIST or (more extensively) by extracting each BACKUP - that would 
show up any errors.

>
> ZIP is probably most commonly used for compressed archives on VMS.  The
> version of ZIP that runs on VMS can save VMS file attributes when told 
> to so
> that it doesn't lose important attributes for the installation kits 
> like tar
> would. (I only came across xz anywhere for the first time about a week 
> ago...) 

It's true that ZIP is probably the most common archiver on VMS (and I'm 
sure it's on the various OpenVMS FREEWARE disks). That said, I expect 
that most people making such images available for distribution (e.g. 
bitsavers) are not running VMS. I'm planning to distribute an ISO plus 
some extra bits, not the individual backup savesets, so attributes 
shouldn't be a problem. I'd expect that anyone who wants to use this 
stuff will run up SIMH and mount an ISO or possibly burn a CD-R and use 
it that way. I might try zip (under Unix, so gzip) for fun, but I expect 
that xz will beat it hands down for space. I guess an ISO could also be 
accessed using LDDRIVER, although my main constraint back in the day was 
always disk space.


I'm not going to try zip on OpenVMS because ... much as I love VMS, SIMH 
on my laptop just isn't as fast as Linux on a Ryzen!


Antonio


-- 
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com