This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 103 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 103 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
On Sat, 2009-09-26 at 08:42 -0700, Derick Eddington wrote: > [...] > With the current draft of SRFI 103, the number of paths where a library > reference's file might be satisfied from is: > > (* 4 number-of-search-paths) > > because for each search path, a library's file might be located at four > possible sub-paths: 1) no implicit file name and no > implementation-specific file name extension, 2) no implicit file name > and an implementation-specific file name extension, 3) an implicit file > name and no implementation-specific file name extension, and 4) an > implicit file name and an implementation-specific file name extension. I was wrong. With the current draft of SRFI 103, the number of paths where a library reference's file might be satisfied from is: (* 4 number-of-acceptable-versions number-of-search-paths) and number-of-acceptable-versions might be infinite. I should revise this SRFI to talk only about the main reason it has single-library files: to have library file path names exactly represent the name of the contained library. Even though the current draft has a one-to-infinite mapping of library references to path names (because of versions), in practice, when a person is trying to find the file containing a library, I think it's better to be able to find it by only looking at a listing of path names instead of also having to open and search through files which might have multiple libraries. I think the ability to analyze a listing of the path names under a directory tree to know the names of all the libraries located in that tree is worth having single-library files. That analysis is accomplished by recognizing the .sls extension and mapping .sls path names to library names. I believe this is worth designing for because then people and programs can look at only a listing of path names and know all the libraries, the actual file contents are not needed, and an additional "manifest" file correlating files to contained libraries is not necessary. -- : Derick ----------------------------------------------------------------