o:     SYSMGT::CLABORN
Subj:   RE: YATR: Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference
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Thanks for the info, George.

Many of these sorts of tricks MS has can be done rather straightforwardly
in VMS, or could be added in with a few (yes, I believe few) definitions
and bits of code. I already have, demoable RIGHT NOW on my workstation,
an app that, aside from doing softlinks, file hiding, extended security
and reliable undelete (by making deletion mean "via a wastebasket") on
VMS, also can be set to fire up a command file of your choice with
any file open.

We could rather straightforwardly also make the internet look like a set
of local disks. I've done some bits like this, but if you think about
how DECnet DAP access works, the netacp interface gives the tool to
allow this.TGV wrote one to talk over IP (that's how phase/IP works)
and we could also, or just use something that translates DAP into
IP requests and use theRMS support for DAP-speaking devices (set
dev$v_dap) and make it look like a pure local disk.

With a bit more hackery (using extensions of the softlink stuff I have
working perhaps) something could be set up that looked like a local
disk, but worked more like a cache of whatever has been asked for on
the net, with expiration dates a possibility too. My package has inswap
technology integrated (it's an HSM too). So does dec HSM, though I don't
know if it's as flexible as mine (which doesn't care what file structure
it uses). That is the underlying kind of technique you can use to
grab files remotely and make it look local...or at least is one such.
The nice thing about using inswap type techniques is that the files
can really be moved to local storage for awhile, then when they expire
the pointers can be left around. (Takes a little more work for directories
but they could be handled too.)

Most of this would be mightily simpler if there were just a simple way
to tell the XQP to restart an open. I have implemented this in a partial
way, enough for what I wanted, but can see that the fully general
extension is feasible, and can well be done as a third party kind of app
even, ie, without disturbing either RMS or any XQP/ACP/other filesystem
structures, or the VMS kernel. What I am using for softlinks is SO damn
close I wish I had thought it through a bit more when designing it so's
to make a fully general solution. Now it'd take a few weeks hacking and
testing to be sure it worked...heavily on the testing part....

I had thought of this kind of stuff as useful for large storage
archives, so you don't need to teach a whole new search language
to people. (And it IS useful for that.) Still, DEC has had distributed
filesystems longer than anybody, and I'd suspect M$ is using an
approach something like what I outlined above, though it may well be
far less integrated, and hiding it behind a pretty frontend. It
would not be that hard to do it in VMS, with no pretty frontend
required; it could be as goddam seamless as you like.

Glenn Everhart