Detecting directory changes
Dave Jones
JONESD at er6s1.eng.ohio-state.edu
Fri Mar 14 21:33:47 GMT 2003
In message <3E72073E.1060700 at qsl.net>,
"John E. Malmberg" <wb8tyw at qsl.net> writes:
>The file system is scheduled for a major overhaul. I can not give
>details, but any program that makes any assumptions about undocumented
>internal structures such as names of locks may break.
Yes, such a program may break in the future when someone eventually tries to
run it under some future version of VMS. In the mean time, there are problems
to be solved now where using undisclosed (they hopefully were documented
somewhere by the developers) interfaces is the only practical solution.
Such a program should isolate and abstract the fragile pieces as much
possible.
You do want to be
able to support disks that are larger than a Terabyte, or files that are
that big don't you?
>Parts of the retired POSIX product were used as a basis of the DII COE
>effort, and the DII COE routines that are used for UNIX portability are
>being merged into the base OpenVMS product. As this is happening, the
>POSIX modules may be removed or stop working. Or they may continue to
>be used. This is being decided by the teams involved.
We just recently went through an issue on comp.os.vms with the CSWING
freeware application that was and still is making invalid assumptions
about how the file system operates or will operate in the future. Some
early programmer apparently got this mis-information from reading the
source listings, or from trial and error.
Now I have put in requests for features to the file system, like a 64
bit ino_t type, storing at file close the apparent UNIX size of a record
oriented file for stat to return, storing the UTC time in addition to
local time so that stat will run faster. I have also requested support
for alternate filenames, to help support ODS-2/ODS-5/ODS-? and 8.3 file
lookups for applications like Pathworks Advanced Server and SAMBA.
But when it comes time to look at funding and time allocation. Customer
requested enhancements get priority over internal requests when all
other things are equal.
The use of the internal POSIX routine may work in the short term, but it
should not be considered a permanent solution.
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
Personal Opinion Only
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