OpenVMS Patch Syndication

Please note that HP have restricted access to patches (even patch cover letters) to people and organisations with valid support agreements. Therefore, this page and the feeds it links to are only here for historical interest. The feeds are no longer updated.

Overview

Do you miss the ease of use of the Sydney CSC patch list? I do. And the ITRC replacement site requires that you register. Bah.

This page is my attempt to list the patches for the various releases of OpenVMS. The information is obtained by interrogating the ITRC FTP server once a day (can't make me register for that) and munging the data into RSS feeds.

RSS?

If you've never heard of RSS, you're missing out on a lot. RSS is a specification for writing a document in XML. Its usual use is in site syndication, in which a site that publishes regular articles often syndicates their content by publishing RSS feeds.

These feeds are then subscribed to by anyone with a news aggregation program.

RSS and a more formal standard called Atom are seeing explosive growth at the moment, with nearly every weblog publishing one or the other syndication formats.

But, as you've guessed, it's easy to dream up other uses for RSS, particularly when the content is date based, as patches are.

If you want to learn about RSS, I recommend you start with syndic8.com, a massive resource that includes a huge listing of syndicated feeds, and documentation covering all aspects of sydication.

News Aggregators

To read the feeds linked at the end of these pages, you will need a news aggregator. For the complete VMS diehards, I am unaware of a VMS based aggregation program. However, there is at least a couple of pure java apps that should run on VMS, although I haven't tested them.

For the people willing to bend a little, there are a slew of aggregators out there that run on linux, windows, OS X, you name it. A good place to start is The RSS DMOZ listing.

My current recommendation for Windows users is FeedReader.

Feed Details

The information in the feeds has, as I mentioned previously, been munged from the ITRC FTP site. Unfortunately, none of the documents there are in a machine readable format (hint, hint, HP). So I have generally hand edited the files so that I have at least a release date, installation rating, and a reboot requirement for each kit. Recently, HP have been much better at providing summary information in the text files that is at least easy to parse. But in the past, there have been files with no dates, or no reboot requirements, etc.

Missing information has generally been stolen from the Sydney CSC Patch site, or the ITRC web site. If you spot an error in the feeds, contact me and I will fix the underlying data files.

Disclaimer

Don't blame me if the info in the feeds is incorrect. I am just munging it from the data on the ITRC FTP site. If you spot an error, let me know.

Here they are

Enough blather, I hear you cry. On with the feeds!

Alpha based

Itanium based

VAX based