At 03:03 PM 11/22/2000 -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:
>At 02:00 PM 11/22/00 -0600, Craig A. Berry wrote:
>>The backquote and the spawn this involves shouldn't be necessary except that
>>VMS::Process for some reason doesn't implement JPI$_RIGHTSLIST; I'm going to
>>look into putting it in, though if Dan skipped it there may be a good reason.
>
>It's not in because VMS::Process was the second perl module I'd ever written, and I
>didn't really understand chunks of the system service interface or how XS routines
>could deal with perl. It's sort of been on my perpetual ToDo list, but I've not done
>it. If you want to, have at it! :)
Hmm. Well, as Patrick has now pointed out, it's just a bit tricky, mainly
because the return lengths are defined statically in an array. We could use
a length of zero to indicate "look elsewhere for the length," then define
another array with a pointer to a length function for each item (like RIGHTSLIST)
that needs one. That function would have to allocate memory, and we'd have
to think about when and where it should get deallocated, and also take into
account that the size of the rights list is dynamic on a running system.
Then there's the matter of post-processing to convert quadword identifiers
into identifier names, which should perhaps be returned to Perl as an array
rather than a comma-separated string. (Similar post-processing would be
necessary for other unimplemented items like PROCPRIV.) OK, I'm in over my
head or at least over my tuit limit.
