[Info-vax] wrong file format

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-01-06 23:33:59 +0000, 1tim.lovern at gmail.com said:

> that is because the philosophy of Unix, at least in the early days, was 
> to treat everything as a stream. This made the I/O the same for files, 
> devices, whatever. At the time it was pretty elegant. You had a unified 
> view of the world.  VMS and other operating systems took a different 
> approach and differentiated between files and devices. They also wanted 
> a presence in the commercial space, so the idea of using ISAM as the 
> native file system made a lot of sense. Having the OS know about file 
> structures made applications easier to play together.
> 
> Unix makes every application have to know about the metadata for a 
> file, VMS manages the metadata for you.  You can discover all kinds of 
> things about a file simply by asking VMS to open the file and fill in 
> all the data structures, FAB, XAB, etc.  Unix will tell you if you 
> opened the file and if you hit the end of the file.

What's called Unix is fairly varied, and most of the distros are past 
the point when apps need to consider record-level activities or 
file-level metadata.

Past the universal debugger printf tool, that is...

The file system and metadata underpinnings analogous to RMS are widely 
available, or are integrated.

I find the local Unix systems much easier to work with than OpenVMS, 
with lower coding effort, far better development tools, and better file 
system support.

Reading and writing app data into those files is vastly easier, whether 
for loading and saving "preferences"-style data, marshalling or 
unmarshalling app data, or using the integrated SQL support.

I haven't had to mess around with file system data structures or such, 
and—thankfully—haven't had to deal with anything as involved as RMS and 
its interfaces. And with better results.

With OpenVMS, I'm finding it easier and faster with various apps to 
bypass RMS and access the storage as sectors—stream access might be 
easier, but sector access are what we have available.

OpenVMS not having an integrated relational database, as is the case 
with the local Unix distro...  Ugh.

Batching up RMS modifications—and if y'all are going to consider that, 
then tie it into the transaction manager—helps with performance, but 
RMS itself—key-value or otherwise—is still a slog.

RMS was great. RMS is still useful. It's just not a differentiation.


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