[Info-vax] Looking for suggestions for new $GETDVI item codes

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-15 01:56:24 +0000, David Froble said:

> Maybe I'm painting with a "too broad" brush, but, today memory is cheap 
> and plentiful.  Why not make anything that might possibly have a large 
> value a quadword.  Yeah, lots of work up front, but perhaps not much 
> more work to do 50-100 (or whatever) than just a few.

Sure.  Great idea.  But it's more than a little work.   For everybody.  
  The client applications will have to be reviewed and modified to use 
the new itemcodes, or to expect the newly- and optionally-extended 
return fields from the existing itemcodes here.   While existing and 
unmodified applications might not fail, the applications also won't 
work as expected when presented with an 6 TiB disk spindle or a 32 TiB 
RAID6 volume, or whatever other fields were extended to quadwords.  
These existing and unmodified applications will likely either get an 
error code they might not expect, or they'll get and process what is 
bogus data, depending on what approach VSI might decide to do here, if 
VSI decides to promote fields.  More than a few existing OpenVMS 
applications haven't made it to ODS-5 support after all, so there'll be 
more than a few that won't get updated for quadword returns...  
Probably fodder for a major release (V9, V10, etc), given the amount of 
effort and change and churn that would be involved here, too.


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