Future STSDAS/TABLES OpenVMS support

Perry Greenfield wrote on Jul 28, 1999

Plans for Future Support of STSDAS/TABLES on OpenVMS
Perry Greenfield & Rick White, Science Software Group
1999 July 28


Much of the motivation for supporting IRAF/STSDAS/TABLES on OpenVMS has
its basis in the fact that OpenVMS has been used for calibration pipeline
processing of HST data at STScI.  Given the greatly diminished use of
OpenVMS for data analysis here and elsewhere, without the need to support
the HST calibration pipeline there would be little justification for
devoting significant resources to supporting IRAF/STSDAS on OpenVMS.

Current plans have all operational use of IRAF/STSDAS/TABLES on OpenVMS
at STScI ending in approximately 6 months.   Here are the future plans for 
support of STSDAS/TABLES on OpenVMS by the Science Software Group:

1) Our next release of STSDAS/TABLES (v2.0.3), is the last that we will
   be testing on OpenVMS.  Even in this release, it is known that certain
   tasks will not work on OpenVMS (including nlincorr, echplot, and most
   non-script 'ms' tasks [e.g., msarith, msstatistics]), and there are no
   plans to correct that.

2) Our support for STScI science users on OpenVMS systems will be limited
   in the next 3 months and will end completely after that.

3) Support for installing and running STSDAS/TABLES on OpenVMS will be
   limited for the next release and will end completely 3 months after
   v2.0.3 is released.

By "limited" we mean that such support will get relatively low priority,
and that not all problems will be resolved, particularly if their effect
is not great.

We anticipate that NOAO will also be limiting their support for OpenVMS
in future IRAF releases.  Interested IRAF users should contact NOAO
directly for details of their plans.

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Last post on Jul 28, 1999