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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-10-07 08:41:55 +0000, Paul Sture said:

> On 2016-10-06, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>> 
>> Oddly, the rest of the universe gets by with ssh, netcat, file shares  
>> and related.    Sure, having an FTP client — or preferably FTPS or sftp 
>>  — embedded into RMS would be nice.
> 
> With an editor which can support ftps/sftp you can reach into a 
> multitude of platforms without the need for editor initialisation 
> files, installing macro collections etc on each system.

Ayup; that one was an eye-opener.   
https://www.marksanborn.net/software/modify-remote-files-with-vims-built-in-ftp-plugin/ 
   How OpenVMS implements that through the file system — effectively, 
support for dynamic volume mounts — and how individual application 
packages implement that on other platforms does differ.   Both are 
workable.   I certainly wasn't the only person that wanted a callable 
FTP client library on OpenVMS — not that I'd be particularly looking to 
use FTP now.    Want OpenVMS back?  It needs to be at least as good at 
and variously better at enough tasks to warrant its purchase and 
acquisition, and the costs and effort of porting code to OpenVMS.  
Getting dynamic mounts working would be one potential approach.

The "fun" part is figuring out which projects to work on.

> The frustrations of editing over 'console lines' which nearly but don't 
> quite emulate a real terminal can be a thing of the past too.

The shifts here have been interesting.   The VSI folks at the boot camp 
referred to the need for an IDE "for the younger folks".   The 
implications of that comment have been entertaining to contemplate.  
Some folks won't ever be pried off of EDT or emacs or vim or LSEDIT, or 
whatever their preferred tools.   Though having a functional IDE (and 
vim keybindings, or EDT or whatever) is handy.



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