Re: Issue: STREAM-CAPABILITIES (Version 1)

[Dan L. Pierson <pierson@mist.encore.com>]

(I'm back on the net after a week and a half of local network reconfigurations)

    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 agree with you but I think Moon's wording (but probably not
thinking) says the exact opposite.  If more portable code is agreed to
be a good thing, he seems to be saying that adding features which
can't be correctly implemented will lead to this good result....

    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.
    
You're getting more convincing every time you say this.  I've really
got to try and get a survey together.

    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".
    
OK, I'll just let the current draft sit for now.