As of the 18th of February, OpenVMS, known for its stability and high-availability, 47 years old and ported to 4 different CPU architecture, has a package manager! This article shows you how to use the package manager and talks about a few of its quirks. It’s an early beta version, and you do notice that when using it. A small list of things I noticed, coming from a Linux (apt/yum/dnf) background: There seems to be no automatic dependency resolution and the dependencies it does list are incomplete. No update management yet, no removal of packages and no support for your own package repository, only the VSI official one. Service startup or login script changes are not done automatically. Packages with multiple installer files fail and require manual intervention. It does correctly identify the architectures, has search support and makes it way easier to install software. The time saved by downloading, manually copying and starting installation is huge, so even this early beta is a very welcome addition to OpenVMS.
↫ Remy van Elst
Obviously, a way to install software packages without having to manually download them is a huge step forward for OpenVMS. The listed shortcomings might raise some eyebrows considering most of us are used to package management on Linux/BSD, which is far more advanced. Bear in mind, however, that this is a beta product, and it’s quite obvious these missing essential features will be added over time. Luckily it at least lists dependencies, so let’s hope actually automating installing them is in the works and will be available soon.
I actually have an OpenVMS virtual machine set up and running, but I find using it incredibly difficult – but only because of my own lack of experience with and knowledge about OpenVMS, of course. Any experience of knowledge rooted in UNIX-based and Windows operating systems is useless here, even for the most basic of CLI tasks. If I find the time, I’d love to spend more time with it and get more acquainted with the way it works, including this new package manager.
>”it’s quite obvious these missing essential features will be added over time”
Should we give it another 47 years?
Just kidding.
You know, Linux from Scratch doesn’t have a package manager and yet I meet people fairly often who are using it as their daily driver. It’s kind of weird to think of package managers as non-essential, but they actually are in fact.
Well kinda depends on essential. Is ‘ls’ essential if you have echo * ? If you’re using LFS, you’re the sort of person that can get yourself out of trouble when you screw up the essential libraries.
‘Essential’ would obviously mean that your OS cannot operate without it. And in the case of package managers, OS’s have obviously been run without them ever since the first OS, and still are run without them to this day. So, package managers, by any objective measure, are non-essential. Even though, to most users, they feel absolutely essential.
If you look at Windows command line Set and Show, you will find more than a passing similarity. They were both written by David Cutler, architect of VMS. The thing about VMS, it may be a challenge to understand the whole thing. It was pretty easy to edit, compile, debug and run programs.
Modern Windows (via Windows NT) has quite a lot of architectural similarity to VMS and Dave Cutler is the main reason for that.
You can read about it on this cool site that I found:
https://www.osnews.com/story/30510/windows-nt-and-vms-the-rest-of-the-story/
A cute but likely coincidence is that if you take the letters VMS and shift each letter left one position in the alphabet you get WNT (Windows NT). Likely unintentional although I have heard people at Microsoft say that the NT internal codename existed first just as letters and that “New Technology” was something they though up later when branding the product.. So maybe…
Interesting, it seems to me like it’s missing 95% of the reasons for using a package manager so even early beta sounds like a stretch.
FWIW the similarities between NT and VMS have been largely overblown.
Here’s a great interview w the actual architect of NT, Dave Cutler talking about the origins of NT’s name and the OS itself:
https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?si=-SIdSqgRcV_j5L5_&t=4232
Out of the blue, and probably improper for a comment on this site (feel free to criticize) — but i kind of stopped trusting OpenVMS recently, despite being an almost-lifelong enjoyer of it. Purely for the fact that i don’t trust their recent extremely suspicious CEO.