[HECnet] Updating Map Locations

[Paul Koning]

> On Dec 9, 2021, at 5:22 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-12-09 20:52, Paul Koning wrote:
>>> On Dec 9, 2021, at 2:39 PM, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> That's a nice hack.
>>> 
>>> Were we to have source to the various NICE executables, I would say that the thing to do would be to a "location" field in addition to the identification field.
>> That's easy enough in principle, the protocol is readily extensible.  The difficulty of course would be to extend the NCP and NML implementations to deliver that new attribute.
> 
> Yeah. And add the commands to be able to set the value, and somehow read it out from another node. It's not enough with just defining the field, or even just deliver it. And it's quite a job if you want to try and update all different OSes that would need it.
> 
>>> Another thing would be a DECnet DNS, which is something that has been on my list to do (enhance Chives)
>> DECdns is a standard Phase V feature.  I have never used it but I remember participating in the design of that specification; it's got a bunch of neat capabilities.  Come to think of it the DEC time service would also be interesting to have.
> 
> The functionality would be nice, but I don't fancy phase V. :-)
> And in Phase IV, while we could do it, you need to write software for various OSes to make use of it. Maybe one day, but this seems another one of those fun hacks, that maybe eventually will be partially done, but will never be for everyone.

I don't know if the various applications developed as part of Phase V are inherently limited to Phase V only.  It may well be valid to use DECdns in Phase IV.  Or DECdts.

	paul