Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!xanth!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!kth!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: VMS vs. UNIX s/w development tools - query
Message-ID: <4401@enea.se>
Date: 31 Mar 89 21:53:28 GMT
Organization: ENEA DATA AB, Sweden
Lines: 36

G.M. Harding (gm@mitisft.Convergent.COM) writes:
>Version-control numbers embedded in
>the OS code and actually used as part of the file name--obscene!
>(It violates the fundamental, Unix-inspired concept of a file:
>a file is nothing more than an ordered collection of data, to which
>the system attaches no special significance other than ordering.

With the risk of turing this into an OS war, I must object here.
I fail to see what fundamental concept being violated, all I 
know that the multiple versions helps me sleep well at night.
Just today I happenbed to press the wrong key in the editor and 
believing I was reading another file, I was actually writing the current
file to the name of the other. (This is my own editor interface,
so don't blame VMS). No problem, as soon as I had seen it. Just
spawn out, and delete the newly-written file and the correct file
was still there. On Unix it would have been long gone. 
  VMS may be violating some theoretical principal, but it gives
you safety.

>Besides, the old versions of files accumulate and moulder unless
>you take special steps to exterminate them. I had one colleague
>who actually had FILE.EXT;1001 in his directory, with all of the
>previous versions as well, and didn't realize that the sysadmin's
>desperate email pleadings for cleanup applied to him. We finally
>got the guy fired.)

Which just goes to show that on any system you're on, you're on
lose ground if you refuse to read the manual. PURGE is an essential
command on VMS, as is SET DIRECTORY/VERION_LIMIT. If you think
that more than one version of a file is a crime, just set the
volume limit for all your directories to 1, and you have what you
want.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
I used to say "It could have been worse, it could have been Pepsi",
then I drank a Diet Coke...