"John E. Malmberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 09/26/2005 02:45:51 PM:
> I have not notice any modules for manipulating logical names, and have
> also noticed that while the $ENV{} allows this, the $ENV{} features that
> are documented on VMS will make changes in the logical name tables that
> would be very surprising to someone that did not read it in detail.
There is one: VMS::Logical, but it is not on CPAN (yet).
Carl Friedberg adopted it and was going to put it there.
I can email you a copy if you'd like to see it.
> The problem is that hindsight is 20/20. There is no way to predict what
> features are important to have in such a module at the time it is
> urgently needed to be available.
Indeed, and that also makes it tricky to add run time feature getters to
an existing pragmatic module.
> Perhaps an os_settings.pm module with methods that can be overridden or
> added to just like pathtools does now.
>
> I would expect such a module to be very volatile for a while until
> everything that needs to be there gets moved there. After all, until
> there is a conflict, no one will know that something should be updated.
>
> And each setting would really have at least three possible values:
> Default setting.
> Initial setting.
> Minimum setting that is always available.
> Current setting.
> Maximum limit on what could be set.
>
> Default is what the environment naturally supplies before any
> initialization files or scripts or environment variables.
>
> Initial is after any initialization scripts, files or environment
> variables have been processed.
>
> The others should be obvious.
Consider the DCL difference between commands such as:
set file /version_limit=0 <filespec>
set file /version_limit=32767 <filespec>
I would not be surprised if a future update to RMS raises
the value 32767 by some amount. What happens to a binary perl
built on VMS V 8.x then run on VMS V 8.y where y > x?
So what is obvious and what is subject to debate? What is subject
to vendor upgrades? Some parameters on some operating systems are at
the whim of the OS vendor. Negative numbers may have special meaning
for certain parameters and be illegal for others. Octal, decimal, or
hexadecimal numbers may or may not be allowed,...
Peter Prymmer
