Re: The Day the Music Dies (was: RE: backup spool file)

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I understand.  I wouldn't think people would be writing the local system's
> VRM to a database.  Well, I suppose they could do that if they wanted to
> use a DDM file on the remote system to read the VRM of the local system.
> But maybe adopting the Linux concept would be more standardized.
> If it just was easier to handle IFS files in RPG though...

If you adopt the "linux way" I think it could make things a lot easier for 
RPG as well.  The linux way is to create a filesystem that only exists in 
RAM, not on disk.  This filesystem is located at /proc and is basically a 
window into the kernel.  Linux has several files there which are really 
just structures in kernel memory.  Thus 'cat /proc/version' simply reads 
the version string stored in memory.

On the iSeries this could be really handy.  We already have the PSDS which 
in some ways is quite similar.  The PSDS could be enhanced to include an 
element which is a pointer to the memory location of the version string. 
Then the iSeries would have two ways to find out the VRM:  `cat 
/proc/version` and dereferencing the PSDS version pointer.  RPG programs 
wouldn't need to access the IFS but there would still be a really simple 
non-programattic way to find out what it is.

The iSeries single level store might even make this stupidly easy to 
implement for IBM.

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw