[Vm-dev] Extending primitiveDirectoryEntry

[David T. Lewis]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 04:56:29PM +0000, Alistair Grant wrote:
>  
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 11:36:52AM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 10:37 AM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> >     > On 21-04-2017, at 10:17 AM, Alistair Grant <akgrant0710 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >     >
> >     >
> >     > Am I missing anything?
> > 
> >     I think so; I urge you to consider working with Dave Lewis to see if it
> >     might make sense to improve his DirectoryPlugin.
> > 
> > +1.
> 
> Sure.  I don't know anything about the DirectoryPlugin, and it looks 
> like it isn't part of Pharo, but I'm happy to help.  It would be 
> particularly good if David can help with the Windows side of things.
> 
> David?


Hi Alistair,

Sure, happy to help. You can find the VM plugin at http://www.squeaksource.com/DirectoryPlugin.

A small plugin is actually fairly simple to do, so take a look at the
DirectoryPlugin as an example, and we can either add the functionality
you want, or just use it as a pattern to make a plugin that does exactly
what you need.

I have been thinking of splitting DirectoryPlugin into two smaller pieces,
one of which would be called PosixFileStatPlugin. If we do that, we would
have a small plugin that addresses only the Posix file stat functions, and
we could fill it out to have it answer the fields that you are interested
in (st_dev).

Regarding Windows, I am not currently in a position to do Windows plugin
development, but I do have an idea of the issues involved and I'm happy
to help where I can. Note that Windows and Unix have different models to
represent "files" and "directories" so there are some actual semantic
differences on the different platforms. The Unix/Posix stat function comes
from the world of Unix, so some of the concepts may not completely line
up with the Windows model. The best references I have found for this come
from the Microsoft technical documentation (I do not have a link right now,
but it is all available on the web).

Dave