15-Sep-2009

Porting again

Recently, I've been engaged to do the technical direction on another OpenVMS Alpha to Integrity port. The first steps are always pretty similar: make the developers and the management team aware of the pitfalls, then emphasize that the majority of effort will be spent testing the ported application.

Having done that, I assertained the level of build automation, which unfortunately was non-existant. Therefore, I spent most of yesterday building the entire application by hand and writing DCL so I would only have to do this once. Fortunately, the application is not too extensive, and the majority of the programs are just a simple compile and link.

I've now handed over my findings to the development team. They need to do a couple of fixes to some modules that failed to compile (even on the Alpha platform) and confirm that I have hit all the executables that will be needed for production.

Hopefully, when I get back there in a few days time, a new Integrity box will be in the development cluster, and the developers will have got back to me.

Then the hard part starts: testing.

Posted at September 15, 2009 1:41 PM
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and discovering all the parts that have not been built for years and noone remembers how to do that.

Posted by: Ian Miller at September 15, 2009 10:46 PM

Having worked in ZKO when VMS was becoming available on Alpha, and later in the Porting Centre here in OZ, I still sing the praises of a) DECSET b) robust build and test procedures, and c) Porting Tools.

Good luck.

Posted by: Peter Q at September 16, 2009 12:25 AM

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