Dear Andreas,

with this in mind I have been working on Rio, inspired by a generally 
useful io library for ruby. After not much work I am quite pleased with 
the results for far.

simple stuff, building paths.

myFile := Rio default / 'hello' + '.txt'.   "or even Rio / 'hello' as an 
abbreviation"

testing & stat stuff:
self assert: (myFile exists).
self assert: (myFile isFile).
self assert: (myFile parent isDirectory).
mt := myFile modificationTime.
ct := myFile creationTime.
size := myFile size.

accessing path bits.
self assert: (myFile basename = 'hello')
self assert: (myFile ext = 'txt')
self assert: (myFile filename = 'hello.txt')

changing rio filename:
myFile ext: 'text'.
myFile basename: 'goodbye'.
myFile filename: 'goodbye.dat'.

renaming files in filesystem:
myFile rename ext: 'text'.
myFile rename basename: 'goodbye'.
myFile rename filename: 'goodbye.dat'.
myFile renameTo: 'world.txt'.

reading writing etc.

myFile write in: [ :str |  ].
myFile < 'contents'.
allContents := myDirectoryRio files collect: [ :f | f read contents ].

more iterating:
Rio default all select: [ :stat | (stat filename endsWith: '.st') & 
fStat modificationTime > '1-1-07' asDate) ]

I did a brief comparison with FileMan
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5929

rio is available from http://www.squeaksource.com/Rio

Rio is different to Fileman in that it does not use FileDirectory at 
all, instead it re-implements all of the same functionality and much of 
FileMan's. Doing so has enabled great economies. Fileman + FileDirectory 
is about 110k of source. RioKernel is 8k with Rio-Core being another 20k.

Rio is experimental, most of it works, there are extensive ramblings of 
ideas in the class comments. Encoding is not yet supported, because I 
don't fully understand how it is used yet. The plan is to break Rio down 
into modules, specifically into a bare minimum "RioKernel" for those 
interested in producing KernelImages. At present I am defining 
RioKernelTests collecting the use cases for defining this Kernel. Once 
RioKernel is defined I hope to be able to make FileDirectory unloadable. :-)

thats as far as it goes so far... more to come

Keith


>
> Recently I got (once again ;-) horribly disgusted by the mess in the 
> current file/directory classes in Squeak and started looking for 
> alternatives. Besides Flow (which I knew about but which is a bit too 
> far-reaching for what I'm after) I was particularly impressed by 
> looking at FileMan which seemed a nice and simple interface to do all 
> the practical things that you need when dealing with 
> files/directories. A couple of questions related to it:
> 1) Is anyone using FileMan in production environments? How does it 
> hold up in practice?
> 2) I presume FileMan still requires FileDirectory and friends in all 
> their splendid uglyness. Has anyone looked at making FileMan the only 
> interface to access directories?
> 3) Are there any other directory/file interfaces I should be looking 
> at in my quest for a bit more cleanliness in these areas?
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>
>


		
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