On Thu, 6 Jun 1996 19:33:00 P Ken Sletten b894 c332 x62525 said:
>A question came up during a local discussion here
>at NUWC:  Is there (or will there be) any easy way to
>re-direct $STDIN and $STDLIST to an open socket ??
>Steve Dirickson mentioned he thought he heard
>somewhere that MPE did not use the "standard"
>UNIX-ish file numbers, and if true that would probably
>result in CGI problems.
 
In 4.5 this was nowhere close; in 5.0 it was still distant, in 5.5 they
have obviously done this for telnet but the fact remains that on MPE that
a file descriptor and a socket descriptor are two distinct entities that
cannot be freely interchanged.  The MPE :FILE concept erased the idea of
device dependence, but networking caught them off guard.  The socket
interface is not as robust as the file system and rather incompatible.
This is a critical flaw which remains ignored.
 
>Also, if there is a CGI incompatibility, was there a
>rumor this would be fixed in 5.5 ??
 
Perhaps my wishful thinking.  5.5 addresses the file number issue but I do
not know if this transferred to the lower level intrinsics.  This is a
critical area which most users ignore.  If 5.5 can send telnet output to
a socket, the file system should be able to as well.  This remains to be
seen as fact or fiction or rumor.
 
>TIA if anybody knows or has a good guess.....
 
If telnet integration was at the file system level, great.  If instead they
tweaked it at the low level like VTSERVER then your applications are still
as in the dark as they were to start with.
 
Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>