Hello Craig,
I monitor this mailing list but am not an active participant.
At the moment I've enabled as the default (on systems that have the
infrastructure) John Malmberg's symlink support in the Perl that will
become 5.10. I'm having second thoughts about whether the underlying
support in VMS is good enough or complete enough to make it the
default, so I thought I would throw it out there for discussion.
...
So rolling our own chdir() should be doable, one way or another. But
this made me stop and wonder how many other CRTL routines that
operate on files need to be changed to handle symbolic links
properly, but haven't been as of OpenVMS v8.3. Anyone know of cases
besides unlink() and chdir() that don't work? Should we be bold and
enable this support in Perl even though we don't know how much of it
actually works?
Can I suggest the thing to do would be to work out which CRTL routines you
would use, then ask HP OpenVMS Engineering to tell you how they behave with
symlinks, subject to the presence or absence of assorted DECC$ logical
names? (I assume here your problem is that symlink handling isn't well
documented.)
You mentioned having to define logical names such as
DECC$POSIX_COMPLIANT_PATHNAMES to get certain behaviour from CRTL, but this
runs the risk of breaking other applications. Did you know you can enable
and disable this and similar behaviours from within a C program? Check out
the decc$feature_xxx() routines, e.g. decc$feature_get() and
decc$feature_set().
Regards,
Jeremy Begg
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