Socket module bug on OpenVMS

[Irmen de Jong]

Hi,

Recently I was bitten by an apparent bug in the BSD socket layer
on Open VMS. Specifically, it appears that VMS defines MSG_WAITALL
in socket.h but does not implement it (it is not in the documentation).
And I use the socket.MSG_WAITALL flag on my recv() calls... and
then they crash on OpenVMS.

I don't have access to an OpenVMS machine myself so could someone
else that has (or has more knowledge of it) shed some light on it?



This also raises the question to what extent Python itself should
work around platform specific "peculiarities", such as this one.
There's another problem with socket code on Windows and VMS systems,
where you get strange exceptions when using a "too big" recv() buffer.

Things like this force me into writing all sorts of error checking
code or platform specific functions, to work around these bugs.
Just for what was supposed to be a simple socket recv() and a
simple socket send()...

In my opinion Python's socket module itself could implement these
workarounds. That would make user code a lot cleaner and less
error prone, and more portable. What do other people think?


Regards
--Irmen de Jong