directory access (was: xbbs features as request)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <7841 at ncoast.UUCP> allbery at ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>I hate to say this, AT&T:  but "struct direNt" was a DUMB idea.
>Incompatibility still reigns supreme.  AAAAARGH!!!!!

Excuse me for interjecting some facts here.

When McKusick wrote the original 4BSD directory access routines,
he called the new directory entry structure "struct direct",
even though it was radically different from what all UNIX systems
had called "struct direct" up to that time.  When the same access
interface started to be used for non-BSD UNIX systems (which in
itself was a step forward), this incompatibility started getting
seriously in the way.  IEEE P1003 (NOT AT&T), in the process of
standardizing the UNIX programming environment decided to fix
this; the IEEE 1003.1 structure is called "struct dirent".  AT&T
based their routines supplied with SVR3 (which started out as my
earlier public-domain implementation of the directory access
library, which had followed Berkeley and used "struct direct") on
the draft POSIX specification, thus "struct dirent".  (AT&T also
introduced a getdents() system call rather than reading the
directory file directly; like the similar Sun system call
getdirentries(), this helps with network file systems.)  Later I
also changed my public-domain implementation to match POSIX,
AT&T, and the rest of the non-BSD world.  (It is also much more
generally portable than previous versions, and has the fastest
seekdir() I know of.)  I believe I heard Berkeley say they would
also switch to "struct dirent", and that calling it "struct
direct" in the first place had been a mistake.