Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!husc6!think!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!mit-kermit.UUCP!krowitz
From: krowitz@mit-kermit.UUCP (David Krowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: procedural interfaces
Message-ID: <8706242145.AA09122@EDDIE.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 24-Jun-87 17:16:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: EDDIE.8706242145.AA09122
Posted: Wed Jun 24 17:16:53 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Jun-87 06:57:53 EDT
Sender: uucp@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: world
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 26

The reason that the procedural interfaces that people have been complaining about
are missing from the system is that not enough people have written UCRs demanding
that Apollo release the system calls. The same hold true for BSD 4.2, if enough
people complained to Berkley they might do something about the fact that many
programs which do useful things must go mucking around in /dev/kmem. I have some
procedures which do the things that A. Petrilli complains about, but they do so
by invoking LCNODE, LUSR, NETSTAT and the like and parsing the output. This
suffers from the same problem as /dev/kmem -- mainly anytime the format of the
output of these programs changes (or the internal structure of /dev/kmem is
updated), the programs which rely upon this method break badly! A 'clean' system
call is always preferable to messing around in a data structure -- it gives the
systems programmer a stable interface to the OS while at the same time allowing
the OS/kernal programmers to make changes that aren't going to come back to haunt
them forevermore.

In short, if you want it and it ain't there, write the UCR! If you can't figure out
what all of the fields are for, then leave 'em blank -- that's what I do and Apollo
hasn't complained about it yet.


                                   -- David Krowitz

mit-erl!mit-kermit!krowitz@eddie.mit.edu
mit-erl!mit-kermit!krowitz@mit-eddie.arpa
krowitz@mit-mc.arpa
(in order of decreasing preference)