At 18:38 03.05.1997 -0700, Stan after Gavin wrote:
>We should ask: why was POSIX added to MPE?  Presumably, to increase the
>set of applications that would run on a 3000... but decidedly not
>because POSIX was, in and of *itself*, a desirable target!

And Posix seems to already do this job quite well. The current 0.7 version
of Samba/iX, which I hope to have ready to release pretty soon, is able to
handle most of the ugly PC names with the mapping I mentioned a while ago
(other mapping methods like Netware/iX or NFS/iX will be added later).

Yes, it is kind of a "workaround" and the filenames look "strange" on the
MPE side -- but at least it works with the help of Posix/iX as of today.

By the way, I think it should be possible (in fact I had a some related
prototype during my CDROM access experiments which are currently low on
"brain CPU" timeslices) to put the mapping routines into an NMXL that can
then be LINKEDIT ALTPROG-ed to programs like SH.HPBIN.SYS (or a copy of
it, if you prefer).

This would make the "ugly" filenames look nice again (at least in SHell).

Yes, it's just another "workaround". But at least gives the functionality.

>My first choice is: *GIVE US THE NEW CHARACTERS*...
>I don't care if I can't access them easily from MPE commands.  If you
>want to add a method of doing so, that's great.  (Of course, I endorse
>doing so...and via the "\" escape character method.)

While I have to agree with Gavin that I also do not like those blanks and
other odd characters in filenames (okay, I admit that I used them happily
in my Apple ][ and Amiga 500 days ;-) it seems reasonable to teach the
file system to handle them and then see which user interfaces are most
appropriate to access them smoothly. Maybe even StarGate or GUI/3000 and
alike (as long as there is at least one access method available in FOS).

Regards, Lars.