Date:	Mon, 23 Oct 2000 13:40:31 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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To:	"Peter J. Farley III" <pjfarley AT banet DOT net>
cc:	djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: New versions of perl require "flock" or working "fcntl(fh, F_SETLK/W,...)"
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On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, Peter J. Farley III wrote:

> Is there any way in the world we can actually implement these 
> functions, perhaps using "_dos_lock" or a copy of the "_dos_lock" code 
> under the covers?

`flock' can certainly be implemented using the DOS file-locking
functions, at least for some of the features supported by `flock' on
Unix.  It's only a question of someone sitting down and coding it.
(If you do that, please also add the corresponding functionality to
`fcntl'.)

Note that, apart of `_dos_lock', there's also `lock', that does
similar things.

> I realize this leads to problems in plain DOS when 
> no SHARE.EXE is loaded, but a documented requirement to load SHARE.EXE 
> to use the new perl functions or to use perl's "flock" emulation (as 
> well as those functions of "fcntl", of course) would be OK with most 
> folk, wouldn't it?

In general, I won't like telling people to load SHARE.  SHARE is evil;
see section 9.7 of the FAQ for one aspect of that evilness.

Are you sure you really need SHARE.EXE on plain DOS?  Assuming there's
only a single program running at any given time (give or take nested
programs), why would you need that?

More generally, perhaps it would be a good idea to explain to Perl
non-users, such as myself, what does this "Storable" for persistent
objects do, to put this discussion into a proper context.

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