Re: Issue: STREAM-CAPABILITIES (Version 1)

[masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

When Moon said

 "I think adding something that cannot be correctly implemented will lead
to more rather than less portable code."

I thought I understood him and agreed. If you add a new feature to the
standard, people will use that feature. If the feature can't really be
implemented "correctly", and different implementors treat the feature
differently, users will write code that winds up depending on the
implementation-dependent interpretation of the standard.

I'm inclined to believe that we should decide what these mean in individual
operating systems, and then see if the concepts map into features that
could be operating-system independent. Trying to write the generic prose
without some specific examples is leading us into more ambiguous wording
rather than less.

I see no reason to separate the proposals here into separate issues. I
think these might well be lumped in with the "pathname" issues in a bigger
category of "standardizing file system interactions".