<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>That's an excellent argument. I was thinking that knowing the OS
type might help the user not issue commands that the remote system
couldn't do. Tops-10 file names were what came to mind.<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>However, feature flags clearly could handle this.<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">The only thing I can imagine is a 'what
if' scenario where somebody dreams up something that the feature
flag doesn't <i>currently</i> cover; the OS Type could be used as
a heuristic until the feature flag was defined and the
implementations caught up.</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">
<p>That would only be a stopgap measure. Special casing by OS
type can get you into trouble if you then have to start worrying
about versions of OS's...<br>
</p>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:D9304024-25ED-4AA2-8E5D-1CFF6FDA25A6@comcast.net">
<hr width="100%" size="2">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On 11/8/21 9:57 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
I don't know why DAP includes an OS type code at all. When I was working on DECnet architecture I repeatedly argued that DAP implementations that do OS type checks are broken, because they are assuming that they can correctly deduce the properties of some remote system from its OS code. The correct way -- which is supported, in detail, by DAP -- is to look at the feature flags to determine what the OS can and cannot do. And if those flags are insufficient for a particular case, the solution is to extend the protocol to add the missing information.
In other words, a client should conclude "the server can do X because it told me it supports X" and not "the server can do X because it is running OS Y".
paul
<blockquote type="cite"><hr width="100%" size="2"><pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On Nov 7, 2021, at 6:40 PM, Thomas DeBellis <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tommytimesharing@gmail.com"><tommytimesharing@gmail.com></a> wrote:
...
On the other hand, I don't remember my FAL/NFT/DAP blowing up on the wrong system, either (they blow up on plenty of other stuff...) It would appear that there are two (2) separate lists of system type bytes, one for NRT and the other for DAP, viz:
...
</pre></blockquote>
</pre>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>