Jon asks:
> And (again speaking personally), I don't understand why customers
> are interested in the "meanings" of the V.UU.FFs. There really
...
> Can someone elighten me?
(BTW: *WHICH* VUFs are you wondering about, the "Release VUF" or
the "MPE/iX VUF" of :SHOWME?)
For a variety of reasons!
A user says "I'm having a problem with the XXX program", and we ask him
what release he/she is on...to help determine if the problem is a known
MPE bug/feature/whatever. How does the user determine this?
Here's one of those VUFs that Christian quoted for some older releases:
Commercial Release MPE/iX
release name v.u.f v.u.f
4.0 B.40.00 B.30.45
So, the user does a ":SHOWME"...*WHICH* VUF does he/she use? The
one that implies 4.0 (B.40.00), 3.0 (B.30.45), 4.5 (B.30.45)?
Yes...*WE* know that *now* the "Release VUF" is the one to look at,
in the middle.
BTW, Christian (carefully?) omitted showing even one release back from 3.0,
wherein the "Release VUF" *DIDN'T* nicely correlate to the "commercial
release name". For the record, here's what I have:
release name Release MPE/iX
2.2 A.41.01 A.51.07
2.1 A.40.00 A.47.01
2.1 X.21.30 A.46.03
2.05 A.31.00? A.24.04 ?
2.0 A.30.00? A.23.18
Back to that user...what else can he/she look at to determine the system
release number? If they're like me, they can't find their FOS tape,
but they pickup their SUBSYS tape. It has a number of "versions" on
it: MPEix (spelled without the "/") 5.0, X.50.15, Date code 3404.
Or, WORSE YET, how about my 4.0 SUBSYS tape... it says:
MPE XL 4.0
vuf B.40.02 <---- "02"?????????????????
I can only assume there was a quiet rev of 4.0 between Christian's
B.40.00 and the tape we recived of B.40.02 ... what's different? Does
it affect the user's problem?
A number of vendors, and other software authors, need to know reliably
what version of MPE their software is running on. And, since the release
of MPE XL there's really been only one reliable indicator:
SYSTEM_GLOBALS_TYPE.OS_BUILD_ID
which corresponds to the "MPE/iX" VUF in a :SHOWME command. (BTW,
that's also the number/phrase you need to do dump analysis of your
own machine.)
So, the "meaning" of a VUF includes:
- what release of MPE am I on
- what patch level of MPE am I on (if this even shows up!)
Some of the bug reports that I've found on HPSL say that something
is fixed in a particular VUF ... which doesn't provide much information
if I don't know if that's a "release VUF" or an "MPE/iX VUF".
In some ways, we've come a long way from MPE V days, when a release
was referred to in various documents as:
a name (Cheetah) ... later a "platform"
a number (MPE 5)
a datecode (#### ... can't remember examples)
a VUF
well...maybe not that far...we've dropped the name, and added a second
kind of VUF :(
This isn't a terribly difficult problem to solve ... I've proposed naming
solutions before, and other people probably have to. Ask Larry Boyd to
dig some of them up for you.
--
Stan Sieler [log in to unmask]
http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html
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