[Info-vax] What would you miss if DECnet got the chop? Was: "bad select 38" (OpenSSL on VMS)

[Michael Moroney]

Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:

>On 2016-10-06 22:04:01 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

>> Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> On 2016-10-06 14:53:14 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

>>>> Build a replacement in pure IP, and tell us when it's ready.
>>> 
>>> DIRECTORY /FTP works fine without DECnet, and supports domain names.  
>>> Available since V6.2.

Not good enough.  The great thing in the old days was that just about
any program that used RMS could access remote files via DECnet, without
any network awareness whatsoever.

>>> SFTP support, a decent client for SMB, and, yes, IP-based FAL-like 
>>> support would be nice.  Particularly with encryption and authentication.

Exactly.  An IP based FAL based on sftp or similar, where network-unaware
programs can access remote files via RMS just like you could do something
like $ RUN NODE::DISK:[DIR]PROGRAM.EXE on any VMS system with DECnet. This
time, securely.

>>> But DECnet is still dead.

IP FAL might be the stake through the heart that's needed.

>> So the bottom line is that DECnet is dead, but 40 year old DECnet has 
>> functionality that today's IP can not offer to VMS. Or am I wrong?

>Oddly, the rest of the universe gets by with ssh, netcat, file shares 
>and related.

Yes and the rest of the world gets by without shared-everything clusters
and M$ PCs filled with bloatware that have to be rebooted every few days.

>> That other protocol can be just as VMS specific as Multinet's DECnet 
>> over IP lines, I don't care. Design it, put it in VMS and perhaps then 
>> we can talk about forgetting DECnet.

Sure.  Make IP FAL mostly system agnostic.  But able to deal with RMS
metadata.  VMS's HP TCPIP's FTP has this right.  If talking to another
VMS system it passes on RMS file attributes.  To any other system it's
just another FTP.

>I don't want to see time spent on DECnet, more time on EDT nor more 
>time away from the port and the roadmap.

You know what's funny regarding EDT.  Not much time actually went into
EDT.  Maybe 20 years ago I looked at the sources and was pretty much
scared off because all the terminal line count stuff was hardcoded
constants.  Bleah.  But a few months ago there was a thread lamenting the
24 line limit and a fellow EDT user talked to me about that thread one
morning.  I was in a really weird mood, what I call my "mission from God
mode" but without a mission.  I was curious and decided to look at EDT
again to see how bad it was.  But then EDT became my "mission" and I
started changing things. I didn't intend to do it all but I did.  I saved
the files I changed and ran a build and holy crap, it worked, first time.  
Not checkin ready, in fact that first pass I just replaced the hardcoded
constants with a "variable" set to a bigger constant, the size of the
window I was using. But now I knew what needed to be done.  And little
time was actually "wasted" on EDT.

Since then I've been prodded a few times to look at the 255 character-
per-line limit... :-) ...much harder.  And there may be more changes
to EDT, not by me.