[Info-vax] SET DEFAULT iterative logical name translation

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-10-22 06:45:02 +0000, alanfeldman48 at gmail.com said:

> This used to be broken. Strange things would happen under certain 
> conditions, like only the directory being changed or the directory 
> being hidden in sys$disk.  It appears to be fixed on EISNER. Is there 
> documentation of this fix somewhere? I've been searching on the web, 
> only to come up empty. TIA!  (^_^(

*You rang?*

Logical names are volatile key-value store design and straight out of 
~1984, and long since and widely used and misused.

For device redirection, they're adequate.

Logical names have had "surprising" edge cases ~forever, too.

The whole of the default directory stuff cited is just utterly 
hilarious, but that design is just too entrenched to ever be fixed and 
the existing stuff deprecated and removed.

Search lists too are surprisingly fragile, particularly with missing 
directories potentially in the mix.

I'd wager that most existing apps don't specify the filenames as would 
be preferable, and many OpenVMS developers aren't aware of the 
"preferred" filename defaulting and translation sequence. Or aren't 
interested in using that ordering.

And then there's what I'd consider the misuse of logicals as a volatile 
and out-of-band and poorly implemented management UI. q.v. CRTL.

Alas, VSI is unlikely to be interested in adding additional checks as 
those sorts of changes have a history of breaking existing and ~working 
configurations, too. q.v. Hyrum's Law.

Best case, app preferences support become available within OpenVMS, 
preferably non-volatile, and existing app-specific file and device 
accesses can then all be redirected from within the app-associated 
preferences, as permitted by local security policies.

But this current logical name design? I'm not sure it's even 
particularly salvageable short of the V3-to-V4-scale rework of the 
whole logical names design, if it's even worth salvaging, and that 
salvaging necessarily preserving most of the edge cases for existing 
consumers. The original logical names were a great idea within the 
limits of the PDP-11 / RSX-11M era. The V4 stuff was far more flexible 
and with better APIs, but whether it really improved this whole area? 
Nowadays, past isolated device or isolated file redirection—where apps 
have been created to allow that—the whole of the design is really 
limited and showing its age.





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