[NTLUG:Discuss] Need some inputs on porting.

[Greg Edwards]

Vaidya, Harshal (Cognizant) wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> We are providing a solution to the following requirement:
> 
> The current scenario is like this.
> 
>  Its a complex application with a lot of GUI and business logic tuned
> towards banking. 
>  Its Deployed on Solaris 2.8.
>  Its completely written in C++.
>  It uses third party tools like Roguewave tools for XML processing and
> GUI.
>  Connects to a standard Oracle database.
>  The application has roughly about one million lines of code.
> 

> 
> Moreover what pitfalls should we be aware of in terms of porting from
> Solaris and Linux?
> 
> If you have anything else to say about this. It is most welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> Harshal Vaidya.
> 

Testing is going to be the most time consuming in a port this big.  Take 
the time to put together a massive formal test plan.  You'll need to 
plan on doing some hand checking on data files when you move from 
Solaris to Linux unless they're all ASCII only.

If you don't already have your makefile set to ANSI and treating all 
warnings as errors I'd suggest you do that and get the build completely 
clean under the current setup.  Then simply switch compilers, clean that 
up and test the results.

Is Roguewave an embedded API or a support program?  If it's a support 
program that should be a non issue.  Even if it's not available as a 
Linux package you can work that out by moving data between servers.

Once you've done the compiler port on Solaris moving the entire package 
to Linux and rebuilding should be reasonable.  TEST, TEST, TEST!!!  You 
might find some Solaris only code during this stage.

The 32 bit to 64 bit could be an issue if your storing raw structures in 
data files.  You might need a file format conversion set for that. 
Using the errors as warnings compiler setting should catch any non casts 
between types.  You might have to rebuild your Oracle tables in the 
move.  Does the Oracle API map long long to bigint?  I assume your 
Oracle access is embedded?

Just my $0.02
-- 
Greg Edwards
New Age Software, Inc. - http://www.nas-inet.com
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