Michael S (already5chosen@yahoo.com) on 1/26/09 wrote:
>
>In fact, downloading a _text_ file over FTP to/from VMS
>works just fine. Last time I tried to do the same with
>binary files there were issues but I used _very_old_
>version of VMS (about 5.3, when AFAIR VAX is supported up
>to version 7.1, IPF and Alpha are currently in
>8.something).

Umm. I'm not talking text vs binary. I'm talking about
things like "80-character fixed record-size with index"
files or the other insanities that VMS supported in its
filesystem. Copy one of those over, and it really doesn't
work.

>Well, I don't know much about VMS, but supposedly backup
>command takes care of that sort of issues.

Umm. That's kind of my point. Do you really want to
be tied to one magic system command that knows about all
the insane file layout things that the operating system
can support?

What about moving files between different operating systems?

What about moving them even within the same system,
but across different filesystems?

The fact is, people have done idiotic filesystems
like that. VMS was just one example. And it's stupid. It's
incredibly annoying, and it makes a simple program to
copy a file suddenly a hugely complicated thing.

End result: the operating system may actually support
lots of odd file formats, but people won't actually use
them, because using them is too painful and too unportable.
So you end up using just "binary" and "text' files, and
even that is a huge pain.

UNIX got this right. You don't have any file types. You
have streams of bytes, and then you can put organization
on top of that stable setup.

Of course, filesystem people decided that they want to
screw up and do all those "extended attributes" etc, but
at least the damage is mostly contained thanks to people
not relying on them - because they can't. So only crazy
people use extended attributes.

>And, of course, even on Linux/Unix/Windows world to
>transfer things around people much more often rely on
>tar+zip or version control than on binary copy.

You really don't seem to know a lot about the whole insane
VMS filesystem. Trust me, you can't even tar it up.

Under unix, you can copy a file with just about anything
you want. Yes, you can use tar/zip, but you can also do
your own program that reads things one byte at a time, or
use "cat" or anything like that. And it's an absolutely
immense advantage.

Under VMS? Yeah, you'd better use the system "copy" command.

Of course, the good news is that nobody writes programs
for VMS, so nobody cares. There really is only a single
program that can copy things, and nobody will ever even try
to use anything else.

But did you ever wonder why nobody wrote programs
for VMS? They sometimes get ported to VMS (and then hit
the whole text-vs-binary issue, but never see any of the
really odd crap), but nobody sane ever used VMS as such.

>Just want to point out that the problems created by
>higher-level abstraction, at least in particular
>case of VMS are not nearly as serious as you presented >them.

It seriously sounds like you have never encountered a file
that actually used records and indexing.

It's entirely possible that people have learnt from their
mistakes and stopped using them, and that you can use
VMS as if they never existed. But the thing was a total
disaster from a system standpoint.

Linus