VMS83A_PTHREAD-V0200 - dependency on unavailable kit VMS83A_SYS-V1200

[Dima Bessonov]

Odd things continue to happen with recently released patches... Patch description for VMS83A_PTHREAD-V0200 claims it is dependent on " VMS83A_SYS-V1200 or later". As we have recently seen, VMS83A_SYS-V1200 was revoked and replaced by VMS83A_SYS-V1300. One may conclude that VMS83A_PTHREAD-V0200 should now be installed after VMS83A_SYS-V1300 but this seems to be wrong. That's exactly what I tried to do - first VMS83A_SYS-V1300 and other prerequisites (VMS83A_UPDATE-V1000, VMS83A_TDF-V0100), then VMS83A_PTHREAD-V0200 but the installation procedure of PTHREAD-V0200 still reports missing kit VMS83A_SYS-V1200! Am I the only one who experienced this problem?

[John Gillings]

Dima,

Please log an urgent case with HP Customer Support. You can't trust that posting this type of issue here will get the message through to the folk who can do something about it.

[Dima Bessonov]

Correction: I was able to solve the problem by: 1) rebooting the system after the installation of mandatory prerequisite patches (UPDATE, SYS and TDF); 2) applying the PTHREAD patch once again.

This is still somewhat odd imho, since the necessity to do a reboot after apllying prerequisites is NOT explicitly listed in the release notes. For the vast majority of VMS patches it is only required to apply patches in the correct order. Be I the author of the PTHREAD 2.0 patch, I would specifically underscore the importance of such a reboot. Mildly annoying, but not a critical issue.

[Dima Bessonov]

See above.

[John Gillings]

Dima,

Please report ANY issues you find installing patches to OpenVMS Customer Support. Stuff that isn't reported doesn't get fixed.

Documenting your findings here is somewhat useful to those that read them, but, as you may have noticed, there are very few OpenVMS engineers active in this forum (plenty of EX-OpenVMS engineers...).

Those engineers that are active do a great job of passing on stuff that's posted here, BUT if you want to make sure the feedback gets to where it needs to be to get things fixed, the only reliable mechanism is a formal report.

As with most things these days, engineers are ruled by metrics. For better or worse, reading and responding to ITRC counts for nothing in objectives and performance reviews inside HP. So, if anything, there's a negative incentive to do anything about ITRC reports because that's time that could be spent on work for which credit can accrue. I'm not saying that's a good, thing, just that's the way the system works.

[Prakash Madiraju]

The release notes of VMS83A_SYS-V1300 ( section 2.2) does mention that a re-boot is required immediately after the kit installation to avoid system instability.