1 Jun
2023
1 Jun
'23
7:09 p.m.
On 2023-06-01 18:27, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
Don't get me started about IETF RFP's...
I think it varies a lot. Most of the ones I've been implementing have
been pretty good, but I know that there are ones that are not fun at all
as well.
Should you ever wish to truly drive yourself crazy, I
can't recommend
Appendix I (Paged File Structures) of RFC959 highly enough. It isso
specific to Tops-20 and /only/ Tops-20 that you can't implement it
without looking at previous implementations of both the FTP client and
FTP server on Tops-20 /and/ TENEX.
That is one I never understood. People sometimes ask me why I didn't use
that for the RSX specific file types that cannot be represented just as
a stream of bytes. I looked long and hard at that part of the RFC, but
could never work out how to actually use it, or how to map it to
something I needed. In the end I decided that it was not usable at all,
but I still feel I don't fully understand it.
But yes, definitely felt like something done specifically for TOPS-20.
Having said that, I would have to confess that I
always seem to find a
way to misunderstand the wording of a standard in such a way as to not
get it right the first time around. It may be an /un/talent. So I
test a lot...
Tesing is usually a good thing.
There are also those occasional cases where certain
things are assumed
and not spelled out.
For example, I don't recall that DAP 5.6 mandates that dates must be in
UPPER case, although the examples do show UPPER case. You may remember
that Johnny and I did some trouble-shooting a few years ago
(23-Dec-2019) to determine that RSX wanted UPPER case whereas Tops-20
was sending lowercase. So the fix was to have Tops-20 accommodateRSX's
expectations, but one assumes that should have been made explicit,
Somewhere...
Well, unless I remember wrong, the spec lists the exact format, and it
is in uppercase in the spec. Assuming that it is case insensitive is an
assumption made without any support in the spec.
So I think it's more or less clear that it should be in uppercase. Maybe
shows a bit of difference in attitudes of groups as well. TOPS-20 people
might have been more "reasonable", while the RSX and VMS groups were a
bit more literal.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol