June 2005

HP takes a hard look at new requests

New Web pages posted at HP's Jazz site chronicle the backlog of finished HP 3000 enhancements; customers can look over what’s ready to test at jazz.external.hp.com/src/ patches. There’s software ready for releases 6.5 through 7.5, but only HP Support customers can do the beta testing needed on the enhancements.

It’s a good thing there’s so much improvement which most of the customers haven’t installed yet, because HP took a hard look at customer requests for more 3000 enhancements this spring. Improvements to the Command Interface were just about all that made HP’s “possible” list. Jeff Vance offered the following HP assessments of the prospects for the vendor’s ability to satisfy the most popular new 3000 requests.

1. IMAGE b-trees issue/defect with regard to wildcard find on master and DBFIND and DBGET.

HP assessment: Not a good candidate.

2. Show % printed in a spoolfile. Mark Bixby has a program which does this.

HP assessment: Possible.

3. Allow tokens which could be interpreted as a lockword, but are inside a COMMENT statement to not be blanked out.

HP assessment: Not a good candidate.

4. Fix problem renumbering V+ forms files interactively.

HP assessment: Not a good candidate.

5. DBFIND should find the entry regardless of which position in the record the value is. (Something like Omnidex and Superdex).

HP assessment: Not a good candidate.

6. Revamp HP-IB support in 7.x

HP assessment: Not a good candidate.

7. Return the number of bytes remaining in the CI’s variable table.

HP assessment: Possible.

8. Support perl better in the CI via a new PERL filecode and recognizing the .pl filename suffix.

HP assessment: Not a good candidate.

9. HELP text and general bug fixes, mostly in the CI.

HP assessment: Possible.

10. #!/file/name support in the CI.

HP assessment: Possible.

11. Permanent allow.

HP assessment: I wish so! But realistically not a good candidate at this time.