[Info-vax] Security, support and VMS, was: Re: A new VMS?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/4/2021 1:18 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2021-05-04 17:08:51 +0000, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply said:
>> There are many things which people see no value in because they have 
>> never experienced them.  Of all the things I listed, this one is 
>> obviously of tremendous value.
> 
> There are many things that people have never experienced, or features 
> that a platform lacks, and thus the folks continue using problematic or 
> inadequate or higher-effort solutions, yes.
> 
> I see little value in logical names, and little value in file versions. 
> Not as compared with competing solutions. Though on OpenVMS, that's what 
> we're stuck with.
> 
> The logical name key-value store could be—for instance—replaced with 
> LDAP. And I've long missed modern configuration file support while 
> working on OpenVMS.
> 
> And file versions paled as our tasks git more complex, and git tougher 
> to deal with, so we git other solutions. Yes, that does mean some of us 
> developers are mercurial.

When used not misused then logicals are nice - logicals for disks,
directories and files can help decouple application from
physical location with very little effort. Of course there
are plenty of cases of logicals being misused for all
types of weird hackery.

LDAP is nice too, but in my opinion a solution for a
different problem. LDAP works in a distributed heterogeneous
environment, but also require much more effort. LDAP
is certainly useful, but I think it would be overkill
for many current usages of logicals.

Configuration file libraries are available for all
the modern languages also on VMS. But given how
much VMS code is still in Cobol/Pascal/Basic/Fortran/C
then a builtin native library may be nice to have.

Arne