Re: How to move a program from sco openserver 5.04 to newer platform

In article <cfd4f75c-4622-4a61-8785-0129b3368e0a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
$John? It was custom written, in fairly old Fortran. (This is 5.0.4
$that he's talking about, after all!). Upgrading is useful, but he may
$seriously need a clean recompile.

If the binary runs OK on 5.0.4, it will in all likelihood run OK on
6. I understand that recompiling with a more modern compiler may generate
better code, but the existing binary may well be good enough. Plus, as
you point out, there might be changes required to the source to get it
to compile cleanly on a newer compiler, which involves the effort of
altering the code and doing testing to make sure that the new version
works properly - effort which is not necessary if he simply runs the
old version on a new server running a newer version of Unix. Bottom
line, for me: while I appreciate that there may be an opportunity
here to produce a binary that runs more efficiently, doing so may
be more trouble than it's worth; simply taking a known working binary
and plunking it down in a new system is probably the path of least
resistance*.

Another option, which is pretty much always suggested when someone
posts "I have an antique version of OSR5 and want to upgrade the box,"
is to run it as a virtual machine under a newer OS on newer hardware.
There are plenty of previous threads with suggestions on what combinations
of host and guest OSes work well for this so I won't try to rehash
them.

*: If I dig around on some OSR5 systems I maintain, I'll bet I can find
some binaries that were compiled for Xenix 386 2.3.x in the 1990s and
simply copied from old system to new system each time a hardware and OS
upgrade was done. They still work so I don't mess with them. And
there are probably some others that I compiled on my first OSR5.0.0
system; again; they still work, so I don't mess with them.
--
Stephen M. Dunn <stephen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
----------------> http://www.stevedunn.ca/ <----------------<<<
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Say hi to my cat -- http://www.stevedunn.ca/photos/toby/
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