MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:24:17 +1000
From: Justin Clift <justin@postgresql.org>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, Christophe Pettus
 <christophe.pettus@pgexperts.com>, Vish Penmetsa <vish.penmetsa@gmail.com>,
 Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, pgsql-advocacy@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: PostgreSql and VMS operating System
In-Reply-To: <551181.1737756577@sss.pgh.pa.us>
References: 
 <CAF14C7Cu-Zjyd59EEnXPLHpUkGoea9AmB9vAn-U2Y1QHDsjCOQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <E0D44021-B723-41C9-B38F-237B7A48D7D4@yesql.se>
 <CAF14C7DZG8mUcaED=jO092b-USQ6sre-LSuaF1Fp3c3iAM314Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <CFD8CDAD-4456-48A9-A582-616ADBFAED3B@pgexperts.com>
 <Z5O7HX4QQPQebEgo@momjian.us> <551181.1737756577@sss.pgh.pa.us>
User-Agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.4.15
Message-ID: <49df303f741ce4a12a4ab757742eed0e@postgresql.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8;
 format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Archived-At: 
 <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/49df303f741ce4a12a4ab757742eed0e%40postgresql.org>
Precedence: bulk

On 2025-01-25 08:09, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
>> On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 01:07:56AM -0800, Christophe Pettus wrote:
>>> So, basically, if you want a maintained VMS port, you need to either 
>>> drive the project yourself, or find others who will.
> 
>> This email thread from 2003 says VMS probably doesn't work anymore
>> because of lack of testers:
>> 	https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/200301071531.h07FVWI08147%40candle.pha.pa.us#0dbc1439f51ec7842125fb8ae200b6da
> 
> I doubt we ever had a working VMS port.  There are precisely zero
> references to VMS in our commit log, so certainly there was never one
> that got removed.  It's barely possible that PG "just worked" without
> any patches under their POSIX emulation layer, but I could not find
> any indication of successful users of PG-on-VMS in the mail list
> archives either.

As a data point, when the recent incarnation of VMS Software announced
their intention to allow Community sign ups a few years ago, I went
and created an account on their system to investigate.  VAX VMX being
one of the first multi-user systems I learned back in the day, before
learning *nix. ;)

Anyway, it went... poorly.  Their system is so crap that users can only
have a very specific set of "special" characters allowedin user 
passwords:

   $#@!%*&

Any other symbols are accepted at password setting time, but actually
cause the user login to fail.

When I attempted to file a bug about this problem, they literally told
me it's not a bug and it working as intended.

So frankly, VMS Software are so completely clueless that I strongly
recommend no-one waste their time and effort on them.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift