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Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

 
Liu Tina
Occasional Advisor

Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

Hi,
Customer application is running on OpenVMS V8.3 with the PERL V5.8-6. Could you help me clarify if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1, Do these PERL module work O.K at the original version PERL V5.8-6?
If there is any extra work should do with PERL?

There are PERL module with:

Config
Getopt::Long
Sys::Hostname
Number::Format
vmsish
Cwd
File::Basename
File::Path
vmsish
Env
File::Copy
POSIX
Time::localtime
Term::Cap
integer
Time::Local
Exporter
VMS::IndexedFile я╝ИFrom Third Partyя╝Й
DBI я╝ИFrom Third Partyя╝Й
Digest::MD5 я╝ИFrom Third Partyя╝Й
Thanks for your great help!
Tina
7 REPLIES 7
Steven Schweda
Honored Contributor

Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

I wouldn't expect much of anything to fail
because of an upgrade from V8.3 to V8.3-1H1,
but if you're looking for a guarantee on
software "From Third Party", then you may be
asking in the wrong place.

Is this "the PERL V5.8-6" the perl which HP
supports?

In any case, it will probably be easier to
run the experiment than it will be to get a
reliable guarantee from anyone.
Hoff
Honored Contributor

Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

No. None of this works.

Why do I write that?

Because you didn't test it.

So by default, YOU know it doesn't work.

How would you find out of it does work?

Because YOU TEST THIS IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT.

If you want a wild-haired guess for your PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT, then you're asking the right question in the right place. That answer is "sure, but don't call the folks here in ITRC when your PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT crashes and corrupts its data."

Will it work? It's expected to. But there's a GULF between the words EXPECTED and WILL.

Are you feeling lucky?

Or are you going to test.
Hoff
Honored Contributor

Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

(And I did a "why should I bother?" test upgrade recently, for something that "should just work" and was utterly hammered by various problems. Ended up reproducing several issues, but also had to swap in the old environment and discontinue the tests. Very happy I didn't put that configuration into production, too.)
Craig A Berry
Honored Contributor

Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

Tina,

Glad to hear about people using Perl for real applications on VMS. While the V8.3-1H1 upgrade to VMS is "just" a hardware release and shouldn't have any surprises, my advice is that you should not rely on advice -- rely on testing instead.

I don't know of anything about Perl that would be sensitive to this particular change, but something you're doing with it might be; i.e., it's far more likely your application would be sensitive to the change than Perl or its modules would be.

It may be you are working in an environment where there is no test system available. Been there done that. About all you can do is keep pointing out the risks of not being able to test and make sure you have two copies of a good system disk backup.
Liu Tina
Occasional Advisor

Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

All,

Thanks for your all reply.
Yes. We are doing testing now but for the customer is Stock Exchang and there are nearly a hundred systems should be upgrade and there are various application are running on.
We should evaluate the workload and the risk for OS upgrade.

If you have experience for PERL with VMS upgrade please advice.

Appreciate your help!
Tina
Bill Pedersen
Regular Advisor

Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

Tina:

Given that the customer is a Stock Exchange you definitely need to test.

If you do not already you should start with the process of a basic validation test when you are planning an upgrade. This is a controlled set of exercises that provide you the confidence of being able to perform the upgrade and not have the application break due to some change in operation on an underlying component, be that PERL or JAVA or C or RMS or the database.

Once the initial validation test has been run you should have an appropriately configured environment to allow you to run the applications - all of them - against a known set of data and be able to then determine your results match the expected. Basically a standard set of regression tests.

And then finally you should have a sufficiently capable configuration for testing that allows you to validate performance has not suffered during the upgrade. This may require many systems to give you the appropriate subset of systems that you can run a reasonable simulation of the real environment and determine if there are any performance problems which have been introduced due to software changes, whether the changes are in the operating system, the compiler(s) or the libraries or in the application itself.

Now these sorts of configurations and testing must sometimes be done against the real configuration using test data on off hours or on weekends if there is insufficient investment in the support infrastructure. This is not unusual given the cost of systems and the desire of companies to not over spend. This can be accomplished in OpenVMS environments by utilizing alternate boot devices to allow for testing - with the proper care to not disturb the production environment to be restored for operation during business hours.

Good luck with the testing.
Bill Pedersen
CCSS - Computer Consulting System Services, LLC
Liu Tina
Occasional Advisor

Re: Do these PERL modules work O.K if the OS upgrade from VMS V8.3 to V8.3 1H1?

Dear All,

Thanks for your all advice. We will contiune upgrade and application testing.

Best Regards,
Tina