[Info-vax] Marketing ideas for VSI ?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-17 11:37:32 +0000, johnson.eric at gmail.com said:

> I actually still like logicals and kind of miss them!
> 
> One possibility to consider is that on at least on Linux, it's possible 
> to create a library that can intercept calls to things like open, 
> creat, stat, and the like so that one could implement your own notion 
> of logicals on at least a per process basis.

Hard links and soft links are familiar to many folks and current 
OpenVMS supports those.

A mechanism available on some platforms and known as an alias are a 
little more interesting.  Aliases are effectively a logical name that 
resides in a file—which is a better spot for a logical name in any 
case—though an alias is more difficult to break.  The alias contains 
the equivalent of the FID and can find the file anywhere on the file 
system, even if the target has been moved since the alias was created.

If y'all are interested in dragging logical names forward on OpenVMS, 
then tie an alias-like mechanism into the OpenVMS online search 
tool—search is a feature that's far from competitive on OpenVMS, and in 
serious need of being dragged forward a decade or two—and allow the 
alias to match the target by SHA-3 of the metadata associated with the 
target file.  Open the alias through any of the normal means, and get 
an automatic redirect to the target file with the matching SHA-3 based 
on the contents of the search database, target file permissions 
permitting.

Alias-like redirection integration into an app bundle—a pre-populated 
or post-populated configuration file, effectively—would also be 
reasonable, but OpenVMS has no concept of packaging app files together.

I'd hesitate to have a patch area for embedding aliases into an image 
because of checksumming, but that would work.

Ponder an open-by-SHA-3 mechanism, too.

Using logical names, symlinks, and hardlinks for one-off redirections 
is fine.  Like using patch*, or xxd-vim-xxd or ilk, for similar.  And 
preferably used about as often as those tools should be.   I do have 
issues with using logical names as an ad-hoc and feature-poor database, 
and as configuration and settings storage.  Configuration data and 
databases do not belong in logical names.


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