[Info-vax] RMS record metadata, was: Re: Re; Spiralog, RMS Journaling (was

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-06-21 16:16, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 22, 2016 at 1:53:59 AM UTC+12, Bob Koehler wrote:
>> In article <877c262a-6c6e-45f6-ad86-e884ffda2212 at googlegroups.com>,
>> Lawrence D’Oliveiro writes:
>>> On Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 6:41:48 AM UTC+12, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>
>>>> Also, IMHO I think the default sequential record type for today's
>>>> world should be stream (and hence the terminator is also included in
>>>> the file data.) I do not think it should be variable length records.
>>>
>>> Hands up all those who think RMS should die already...
>>
>>    Them's fight'n words.
>
> RMS does too many different things, all tied together:
>
> * I/O buffering, because the underlying ACP/XQP layer only allows reading and writing whole multiples of 512 bytes (how dumb is that?).

That's no different than any other OS, and happens because the hardware 
actually only do this. You cannot avoid the hardware.
On Unix systems, though, you have the I/O buffering done in the kernel 
in a way that most people don't realize. But this is what the block vs. 
character devices are about. Character devices run through OS buffers.

> * Enforcing a bunch of pointless record formats, kind of tied in with the buffering issue, but really just to prevent you from reading and writing files as streams of bytes.

But a file on a disk is really not a stream of bytes. Where did you get 
that idea from?

> * Implementing an elaborate ISAM file format. This might be useful, until you consider that something like SQLite offers far more functionality, at a low enough overhead to be included as standard on that Android phone in your pocket.

Fair point.

> * Filespec parsing (nothing to do with the “R” in “RMS”!). I remember looking at the microfiche source for this in days gone by, to see notes about bugfix after bugfix in the header comments. Why was this ever written in assembly language? Was it ever rewritten in BLISS?

Huh? The filename parsing in RSX is written in BLISS. How on earth could 
it be that the VMS version would be written in assembler? That's a 
surprise to me.

	Johnny