An increasing number of LISTSERV maintainers or potential future maintainers
has been asking me to state what my intentions are as far as future versions
of the various flavours of VM are concerned. I have realized that it might
save me a considerable amount of time to add such a statement to the
installation guide. In case you were about to ask me the very same question,
here is the answer... :-)
Eric
PS: Please excuse the aerobuzz tone and Executive Vocabulary - usually the
persons who asked me about this needed an answer for their Manager... :-)
>>> Excerpted from LISTINST MEMO, document number S01-003
Statement of Support
At the time this document was printed, it was not yet clear whether or
not IBM would decide to abandon the "HPO family" or not. We are
however in a position to make a Statement of Support for some of the
products in the VM gamut.
Existing products:
o We intend to keep supporting VM/SP CP Release 4 and 5; VM/HPO CP
Release 4.2 and 5.0; CMS Release 4 and 5 in the future. If a
Version 2 of LISTSERV is developed, it will still support those
operating systems.
o Although we will not remove support for VM/SP, VM/HPO and CMS
Release 3 from the current version of LISTSERV, we have already
decided that they would no longer be supported if a Version 2 of
LISTSERV were to be developed.
o We do not intend to provide any support for CMS Release 5 full-
screen mode, nor any support for non-english CP and CMS message
repositories.
o No provision will be made to allow LISTSERV messages to be trans-
lated, i.e. National Language Support will not be made available
for LISTSERV.
o VM/XA SF will not be supported. See below for more details on the
"XA family".
Future products:
o We intend to provide full support for VM/XA SP CP, as soon as the
degree of compatibility of this operating system makes it reason-
ably possible for us. For the time being, this support will be
limited to 370-mode. We are not yet in a position to make any
statement about a possible XA-mode port.
o We intend to provide full support for CMS Release 5.5 in 370-mode,
as soon as it becomes stable and reliable enough to make it
worthwile.
o We intend to provide support for all the future versions of VM/SP
CP and VM/HPO CP that IBM may release, as long as the conversion
does not require an undue amount of time that would not be justi-
fied by the benefits that might be gained from the use of the new
features of these future operating systems.
o We do not intend to support CMS Release 6 unless IBM releases an
HPO 6 operating system or CMS Release 6 becomes available as part
of VM/XA SP, unless the conversion effort is negligible. Specif-
ically, LISTSERV will not be modified to support the new Shared
File System of CMS Release 6 unless this facility becomes avail-
able to HPO and XA operating systems; even in that case, we
reserve the right to reverse this statement once CMS 6 becomes
Generally Available and we have assessed the amount of work
required to perform this conversion.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Summary of the Statement of Support |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| o VM/SP CP Release 4, 5 and future releases thereof, VM/HPO CP |
| Release 4.2, 5.0 and future releases thereof, VM/XA SP CP, CMS |
| Release 4, 5 and 5.5 are strategic development axis. |
| |
| o VM/SP CP Release 3, VM/HPO Release 3 and CMS Release 3 are |
| being abandoned. |
| |
| o It is very unlikely that CMS Release 6 and its Shared File |
| System will be supported in the future if IBM does not make it |
| available as part of a future version of VM/HPO and VM/XA. If |
| they do, it may or may not be supported, depending on the |
| amount of work required to perform the conversion. |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
