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Steven M. Schweda wrote:
> From: Micah Cowan
>
>> [...]
>> Gnulib actually has quite a large number of modules designed for
>> portability; I imagine we could benefit from several of them.
>
> Well, yeah, where "portability" is limited to various UNIX-like
> systems and Windows. As I said
> ("http://www.mail-archive.com/wget@sunsite.dk/msg10077.html";), it's all
> useless on VMS, so I'd prefer some kind of easier-to-deal-with level of
> abstraction.
Well, I don't actually see where you said that about gnulib getpass
specifically. Though now that I look at the code again, I see that it
uses termios.h for the non-Windows stuff, so lack of such portability
seems likely. I hadn't had a chance to look closely enough at the code
to think about what platforms aren't supported, just enough to see a
couple that are.
My preference would be to use getpass, which seems suitably abstracted
already, and modify it as needed to support VMS. Hopefully, gnulib
upstream would be interested in those changes (worth checking, at the
very least), and it can be merged back up.
> If you're completely disinterested in (or hostile to) having this
> program run on VMS, we could save a lot of my time by declaring it now.
I think we've already discussed my level of interest in VMS support, in
private correspondence. If it needs clarification: I can't say that I'm
"committed" to VMS support, but I'm interested to supporting it where
feasible/practical--the more platforms supported the better. I certainly
don't see password support getting in the way of this.
In the worst case, it wouldn't be a terrible thing to enable password
support only on "supported" platforms, until such support can be added.
It's the major things, such as actually building, and interfacing
reasonably with the local filesystem, etc, that would be the major
definers for what OSses are "supported", IMO.
My policy for multiplatform support is likely to be as follows, and I
believe this holds fairly generally within the GNU world: I will be
concentrating on writing for the GNU platform, and will rely upon users
of other platforms to supply what adjustments are needed to support them.
AIUI from previous communications with you, Steven, a good part of the
outstanding issues with VMS support in the current wget code have to do
with interoperation with FTP servers that run on Wget. This is a
somewhat separate issue, as even if I was absolutely uninterested in VMS
as a platform upon which to run wget, I will always be interested in
interop problems with reasonable FTP servers running on obscure
platforms. At any rate, I expect that reworking certain aspects of the
FTP client code to be more portable/general (such as discussed in
another recent thread, in which you provided some extremely helpful
cross-references to pertinent threads from the past) will resolve this
issues, without requiring any particular VMS-specific code (other than
what already exists, at any rate: and we may even be able to pull that
out altogether, along with some of the other server platform-specific code).
- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/
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