[Info-vax] Logical names, was: Re: Command Procedure Pipe output to a variable

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-10-09 23:04:00 +0000, Tad Winters said:

> <<snip>>
> 
> This whole topic has left me with thoughts of how to design a method of 
> preserving current logical name translations for system and group name 
> tables across system reboots, including considering the idea of 
> restricting the possible translations and providing a comment which 
> designates the use of the logical.
> 
> Dang it.  I have other things I need to think about. :-)

Congratulations, you're now considering building an app- or 
user-preferences API.

Logical names are a very limited means of manifesting those settings 
into the apps too, as your character-encoding is limited. Having an API 
to access preferences also gives you options that don't exist with the 
logical name APIs such as wildcards. (Well, other than invoking SHOW 
LOGICAL and parsing the results of course, and which is unsupported.) 
And with logical names as the manifestation, you can be building a 
parser in the apps for what should be considered untrusted data.

Existing examples of preferences files include X and its preferences 
file processing, various app-specific examples present within OpenVMS, 
and examples from other platforms. 
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/preferences/

Persistent storage of the settings can be file-based, or in LDAP. For 
file-based persistence, you'll probably then be looking at JSON, YAML, 
maybe Protocol Buffers, maybe (probably not) XML, etc. 
https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview Or you can 
stuff it all into app-maintained fields within a punched card structure 
in an RMS file, of course.

LDAP is what cluster-wide and network-wide logical names, SYSUAF, 
user-specific account details, user mailbox information, and many other 
details will all be based on, should VSI decide to refactor the current 
designs to address the existing limitations. Alas, OpenVMS integration 
with LDAP past the rather limited external authentication 
implementation is presently lacking.

I'll leave discussions of the Windows registry for another day, though 
that too is already an option on OpenVMS.

Many Unix systems use dot files for settings, and you will find some of 
this usage on OpenVMS.



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