Re: [Monotone-devel] renaming monotone executable (again)

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

In message <address@hidden> on Sat, 4 Mar 2006 01:47:42 -0800, Nathaniel Smith 
<address@hidden> said:

njs> On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 12:17:15PM +0100, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker 
wrote:
njs> > Uhmm, please no.  A dot file like that is a portability
njs> > nightmare, trust me (I'm still planning on porting to VMS if I
njs> > can, I just got to find the time to upgrade the C++ compiler).
njs> 
njs> I trust you, but could you elaborate anyway? :-)

Sure.  On VMS, at least with the file system called ODS-2, which is
still very common, files have the following syntax, expressed as a
regexp:

    [A-Z0-9\$_---]{0,31}\.[A-Z0-9\$_---]{0,31}

Directories *always* have the extension .DIR, without exception.
Therefore, a directory name starting with a period is simply
impossible.

This means that in all places where we have to deal with a dotted file
name for a directory, we will have to have a conditional to define the
alternative for VMS.  It might seem simple enough today, since there
are probably not many places where MT is currently defined, but
experience has shown that as a piece of software matures, things like
names tend to spread around, be used by scripts (it already happens,
see monotone-import.pl), whatever, and for every such place, there
will have to be a conditional that selects something like _MTN for VMS
and .MTN for Unix.  It gets annoying after a while to say the least.

njs> I had a vague impression that VMS had enough interesting
njs> differences that one more thing like this would not make much of
njs> a difference either way, but this is not really based on anything...

There's a pretty good Unix compatibility library these days, so at a C
level, it's not too hard these days.  I will have to figure out a
different way to do configuration, but other than that...  However,
file system differences are still something to be aware of, they don't
go away so easily.

Besides, there's different ways to see this.  Yeah, there may be
enough interesting differences already, why add another one?

Cheers,
Richard

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-- 
Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including
 the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
                                                -- C.S. Lewis