There were two posts about "MHonArc and VMS" on this list recently,
so here my few cents worth on this issue:
It turns out that MHonArc was remarkable easy to port to VMS, thanks to the
excellent job Earl has done in the first place.
A few minor modifications however were needed:
1. Initially I worked with Perl 5.003 and had some problems with the
mapping between VMS and UNIX style file names. This seems to be mostly
resolved with Perl 5.004_04 and all of the following relates to this
version.
2. VMS doesn't like filenames with 2 dots, like ".mhonarc.db".
Change in lib/mhinit.pl:
## check for VMS
$VMS = ($^O=~/vms/i);
$DBFILE = $ENV{'M2H_DBFILE'} || (($MSDOS|$VMS) ? "mhonarc.db": "
$LOCKFILE = $ENV{'M2H_LOCKFILE'} || (($MSDOS|$VMS) ? "mhonarc.lck":
$DefRcName = $ENV{'M2H_DEFRCNAME'} || (($MSDOS|$VMS) ? "mhonarc.rc" :
3. The current Perl version doen't support flock, so disable the locking.
In lib/mhopt.pl simply put a
if (!$VMS) {
}
around the "Create lockfile" section.
If these two mod's are done one can run "perl install.me" and get going.
Note that:
* The -outdir argument must be specified UNIX style.
* Avoid any $ in a filename, some interpolation will certainly mess it up.
It ended up defining a few extra logicals like
$ define kp3_root kp3$root
to have $ free absolute pathnames in the usual $-prone VMS environment.
We are using MX (Message Exchange) from Hunter Goatley for our mailing lists.
I have written an essentially trivial Perl filter to convert the MX archive
format to the MH format and setup a batch job to update the MHonArc archive
in a regular fashion.
--
Walter F.J. Mueller Mail: W(_dot_)F(_dot_)J(_dot_)Mueller(_at_)gsi(_dot_)de
GSI, Abteilung KP3 Phone: +49-6159-71-2766
D-64291 Darmstadt FAX: +49-6159-71-2989
WWW: http://www-kp3.gsi.de/www/kp3/people/mueller.html
PGP: http://www-kp3.gsi.de/~mueller/pgp.shtml
