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Re: upcoming revision, need feedback

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 Thu, 2010-01-28 at 12:45 +0200, Vitaly Magerya wrote:
> Derick Eddington wrote:
> > The social solution has the problem that people would be guessing what
> > characters they shouldn't use, leading back to the current situation of
> > trying to get everyone to be consistent.  Unfortunately, we can't remove
> > the OS restrictions which make the additional feature of encoding
> > necessary.
> 
> We can with a slightly different design. Instead of specifying the
> mapping from a library name to a filename, you can specify the reverse
> mapping, and then let e.g. a tool to generate the catalog with the
> direct one. In this design you'll be permitted to escape any character
> at your discretion, and your libraries will still be found.
> 
> This is basically how SLIB manages packages.
> 
> This will also allow libraries with names "aux", "con", "nul" and "prn"
> to exists (as e.g. %61ux.scm or pr%6E.scm); in the current design they
> can't because it's impossible to create aux.scm in Windows.
> 
> But don't get me wrong, I'm only listing a possibility, not advocating
> the design.

I actually already explored that, because of its advantage of flexible
encoding.  I decided against it because: (1) it requires renaming
library files when exchanging them across platforms; (2) regenerating
the registry every time a library file is added or removed is
unacceptable (IMO); (3) without a pre-generated registry, the speed of
finding library files, by listing every directory up to the last
library-name component and decoding all entries, scales very badly (even
with a cache), for realistically larger sets of imports with
realistically larger sets of available library files, such that program
start-up speeds would be unacceptable.

About Windoze's "aux", "prn", etc. disallowed file names, I don't know
what to do.  Part of me wants to leave it unsupported as a surprise for
users, to enrage them to revolt against Windoze; but maybe that means
the encoding should be removed, to cause more rage against Windoze..?
By the same justification for the encoding, I suppose this SRFI should
do something to make library files with those names work for Windoze,
e.g. by encoding the first character.

(Windoze -- many trillions of person-hours wasted dealing with its flaws
-- perhaps an ingenious strategy of the evil power elites to continue
restricting the serfs as increasing technology threatens to free them.)

-- 
: Derick
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