Subject: [Vim-vms] RE: Error with different VMS file record formats

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 13:30:06 +0200

hi,

Sorry for late reply... I found this mail deep in my saved mailbox, and I am not sure have I answered or not. 

However... what you described was a typical behaviour of pre 6.0ad version of Vim. Vim was not aware of VMS file formats and it read what ever format and forced one (I do not remember really which one).
From version 6.0ad (development version) Vim check the file VMS format and it will not change it after save/backup. Special, unexplained problem was with Stream_LF that could not handle in binary format therefore this VMS file format vim handle in line per line basis to avoid extra LF-s after 4096 chars (what is actually the default record size in Stream_LF)

Please, make same test with Vim 6.0 or 6.1.

Regards, Z 

Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 14:09:56 +0200
From: Coen Engelbarts <[email-masked]>
To: "VIM-VMS bug reports (E-mail)" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Error with different VMS file record formats

Hi,

A colleague was editing file in vim, joining two lines and writing the file,
but the file did not change. It looked OK in VIM, but re-opening the saved
file gives the unchanged file.

(Note: this can also happen if you include the VMS file version in the vim
command, e.g. (vim file;1")

It turned out that the file had record format "Stream" in stead of
"Stream_LF".
"DIR/FULL" will show the record format.

After converting the file to "Stream_LF", vim worked fine.
I don't remember exactly, but he converted it using something like
    analyze/rms/fdl/out=file.fdl ...
    edit file.fdl
    convert ... file.fdl
I suppose you can also copy/paste the file contents to a temporary Stream_LF
file, delete the original, and then rename the temp file to the original.

AFAIK vim tries to recognize the text-file-type (Unix/DOS/Windows/VMS/etc),
but apparently this does not work correctly for all VMS record formats.
Perhaps it is possible to add support for different VMS record formats, or
at least give a warning when the record format is not supported.

Coen