[HECnet] Arabic / Unicode support on VMS?

[Johnny Billquist]

By the way - to expand a little on why this will not be easily doable under Unix:

Name resolution in RSX is done by one task, and not separately by each task. This is an important feature, as the resolver cache will be able to be shared by all programs on the system. In Unix, each program does name resolution individually, and any data extracted is only available cached by that process. To get around this in Unix, you need to run a local domain name server, which you go though, and which cache things.
However, if you run a local domain name server, that process obviously will *not* be able to access your environment variables.
So the whole thing just will not allow itself to be done easily.

Under RSX, moving a program over to run as a specific user on a specific terminal is actually supported, and when this happens, you also gets the same logical name hierarchy as anything else running on that terminal. So there it do work, and I don't even need to run a full DNS server, as I can let this be done as a part of just the resolver side.

	Johnny

On 2013-12-20 00:18, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Hi.

On 2013-12-20 00:07, Clem Cole wrote:
logical names have a unix equiv. in environment variables.

Sortof, but not completely.

there are some differences and advantages to both but the idea and
practice ends up being the same IMO

I disagree.

what you are doing in resolve$foo could just as easily be put in the
environment and get the same result

No. Because I have (obviously) system wide logical names, which provides
the system defaults for this. Any user defined logical names will
override the system ones.
This concept of having logical names on several levels (system, group,
login, session, task) do not have an equivalent form in Unix.

There are more aspects of environment variables that differs from
logical names as well. Which also is a part of the reason you don't use
environment variables for some things, and instead do have the small
text files. (And I love small text files, by the way, so don't
misunderstand me.) It's just that in some situations, other solutions
can give a different bias, which might make some things easier.

that said you are correct that unix often used small txt files for
some set up and configuration but some programs used the env too.
truth is sna files were used in some of the dec OSes too -   it was
just a matter of taste.

I don't think one is better than the other -- I do think when in Rome
I would want to use the scheme that is the operational standard under
the least astonishment principle

I'm not even going to get into an argument about which is better, or
which thing was done in different places. That is a totally different
question.
Both ways work, they provide different pros and cons.

I just totally love the solution I have come up with for name resolving
in RSX, which allows me to easily solve some details which I have found
very hard to do in a simple, clean and nice way with the resolver
solution that exists under Unix.

        Johnny



Clem

On Dec 19, 2013, at 5:14 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

On 2013-12-19 21:07, John Wilson wrote:
From: Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se>

To get more on topic - I'm working on a name resolver for RSX right
now.
It's a totally awesome thing, and I only wish Unix (or even VMS) had
something similar.

Me too!   Port?

To Unix? Not likely. Logical names just don't have a good equivalent.
The Unix way is text files with configurations instead. But the form
of that is already established, with the /etc/resolv.conf and
/etc/nsswitch.conf (and /etc/hosts) files. Hard to change, and those
do unfortunately not easily allow user overrides at any level.

(Now I just need to finish the DNS part of it.)

Details.   Sounds like good engineering so far.   Nice going!

Yeah. The DNS part is not really difficult. It's just a question of
setting up and sending out UDP packets, and then parsing the
responses. Although I must admit that DNS have some bits that I'm not
too happy about.

Working on building the DNS query right now. That is actually really
simple. Doing the parsing will probably take a few days of work.

      Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol




-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol