[Info-vax] Use of logical names other than I/O redirection

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-09-13 07:58:46 +0000, Marc Van Dyck said:

> Arne Vajhøj has brought this to us :
> 
>> 3) Logical names does not scale well. 50 fine, 100 fine, 200 fine but 
>> 100000 does not work. Windows registry is a fine example of something 
>> that has become so big that it is difficult to find things.
>> 
> Not if you use separate, dedicated logical name tables. Putting 
> everything in LNM$SYSTEM is of course not good practice, but desiging 
> applications to use their own table(s), use rights ids to grant access 
> to them, and connect automatically to the right tables at login time 
> works perfectly for me. We also use such mechanisms for our development 
> environment, so that each version of each application gets its own set 
> of tables.

That's kinda the definition of not scaling well.

But as you have a small and self-contained environment with simple 
requirements, by all means logical names can and should be used.

Again, my belief that logical names are a bad solution for 
configuration data and are just complex and convoluted and volatile and 
disjoint does not mean y'all shouldn't use them.

Logical names are what they are, and the available OpenVMS alternatives 
for app and system configuration data storage are lacking. Which is why 
logical names continue to get used. Later, rinse, repeat.

It's also why we get messes such as the DEC C logical name thicket, and 
a more recent favorite of mine, and the ever-popular 
defaults-to-an-open-relay-whoopsie SMTP server database.

OpenVMS doesn't do this app-local and app-isolated stuff at all well 
(which tracks back to other issues and errors and limits), though it is 
feasible to create a DSL with lib$table_parse, and it is possible to 
use LDAP (though not so well nor so easily, strictly locally), and 
various languages do have language-specific configuration storage 
mechanisms.


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