e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

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.