On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> wrote:

>
> On 20-Nov-09, at 8:23 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>
>  Colin,
>>
>>    you say nothing in the tutorial about Windows drive letters.  I imagine
>> 26 upper or lower case selectors could provide e.g.
>>
>> FSPath C / 'plonk' / 'feep'       => C:\plonk\feep
>>
>
> You're right, I should have a section on how things work on Windows.
>
> The above example isn't quite right, because Windows drives are actually
> separate filesystems, in contrast to Unix's single-rooted filesystem. So the
> twenty six selectors should be on FSReference. It's a great idea though,
> thanks!
>

I wonder how useful that distinction is.  Remember in unix different
filesystems can occur within the same namespace, e.g. mounting something on
/usr or /home or /mnt etc.  Even though the Windows drive letters do map to
different file systems they are still a single namespace.  Yes there will be
operations that will fail across file systems (rename) but there will still
be operations within the same filesystem that will fail (e.g. copy to a
write-protected directory entry).

If FSReference can be done without and added as a whistle for special
purpose use then all the better.  Something minimal, effective and easy to
use is the sweet spot.

BTW, one thing that always frustrated me about the VW implementation was not
being able to proceed through certain exceptions.  The classic example is
implementing find in the presence of unreadable directories where you want
to be able to proceed across the read protect rather than aborting the
entire find.  i.e. there's some utility on a path such as allChildrenDo:
upon which is built find like facilities.  At the find client level one
wants to be able to wrap an exception handler around the allChildrenDo:
invocation that will e.g. report errors to the transcript but proceed
without aborting.

So a good set of use cases is making it easy to implement some basic unix
utilities, mv, cp, find, cat etc.

I'm probably attempting to teach you to suck eggs, forgive me :)


>
> Colin
>
>
>
>
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