mth@RICE.EDU.UUCP (08/01/86)
We recently installed VMS Version 4.4 on our VAX 11/780. As far as I know there have been only two major problems we have seen with 4.4. I am posting these to the net so that other unsuspecting VMS users can save themselves the trouble of figuring out what has gone wrong when they find themselves in these situations. The first problem is that shareable programs cannot be terminated using the STOP <process> command from DCL. We had some terminal problems here on a cluster controller and some users lost their terminal connections in the middle of ALL-IN-ONE sessions. After getting reconnected on another terminal line they decided to kill their abandoned login process using STOP. After this was done, ALL-IN-ONE did not work at all. Invoking ALL-IN-ONE caused the terminal to become unresponsive and the first menu was never displayed. Other programs still seemed to work normally. The only solution that the system people here could come up with was to shutdown and reboot the system. Apparently there is a bug in 4.4 VMS so that when a shared image is STOPped, it botches the program for any other user that tries to access it. I haven't seen this problem with any other programs, but ALL-IN-ONE is probably the most widely used program on our system. I am not sure what other programs are installed as shareable, but presumably the same thing could occur with any other shareable program. The second problem is that Fortran programs using the screen management (SMG) routines in the Run-Time Library that use the constants defined by DEC (such as SMG$M_BORDER, SMG$K_TRM_UP, etc.) by including $SMGDEF do not compile properly under VMS Fortran Version 4.4. When older versions of Fortran are used with 4.4 VMS the programs compile correctly. This seems to be an oversight in the distribution of VMS Fortran Version 4.4 since the module $SMGDEF in SYS$LIBRARY:FORSYSDEF.TLB contains only status and error code definitions in the 4.4 distribution, whereas the earlier distributions contained the other constants. The problem could probably be patched by merging the old $SMGDEF module with the new one and putting the combined module back into FORSYSDEF.TLB (our system people didn't want to create a non-DEC system file so we didn't do that here). I was able to get my Fortran programs to compile by extracting $SMGDEF from the old FORSYSDEF.TLB and including this file in my Fortran program. I hope a new version of VMS Fortran comes out soon so that I can get rid of all those extra 'INCLUDE' lines in my programs.