[Simh] Way out idea for simh

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-04-21 00:00, Sampsa Laine wrote:
>
>> On 21 Apr 2016, at 00:56, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>
>> This is not a "small" thing. This would be a huge effort if really wanted this to become ubiquitous. And I still fail to see the point. We've basically established that binary files will still not work, so we're down to text files. Why all these extra steps for something that can be done with already existing tools?
>>
>
> Binary files COULD work if we store the file metadata in another file..

Where would you get the metadata from? And you have a lots of different 
types of binary files, multiplied with a lot of different systems. You 
want to try and figure out some system to handle all the variants?

> The structure of the metadata file would depend on the host OS but SIMH doesn’t have to care - it just sticks the stuff in the file and it’s up to the guest OSes transfer tool to create/interpret it.

It's up to whoever puts the file into that container/raw device/whatever 
to make sure that the bytes also match up with the metadata, and the 
tool used to extract the file, so that the final binary output becomes 
what was expected.

> You could also write tools for the host OS to create/view these metadata files..
>
> But it’s non-trivial and probably not worth the effort.

Everything is always doable. The amount of work required, to just do 
something that there already are tools for, seems excessive. Or if there 
aren't any tools today, it's most likely because people did not find it 
worth the effort. Meaning it probably still isn't worth the effort.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol