[squeak-dev] FileSystem (was: About (backwards) Compatibility)

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Thu Dec 13 15:51:48 UTC 2012


On 13 December 2012 14:52, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 6:34 AM, H. Hirzel <hannes.hirzel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, and the inclusion of Colin's FileSystem into Squeak is planned
>> for 4.5 as I
>> understand the minutes of the board meetings.
>
>
> Well, it was proposed, and a few board members were receptive to the idea,
> but that's not a final decision. Just to be clear, the Board's job is to
> manage the administrivia of community infrastructure, like servers and
> mailing lists. Setting the development agenda falls the community at large.
>
> I think the best way to introduce Filesystem in the base image would be to
> include just the core packages (FS-Core, FS-Disk, FS-Tests-Core and
> FS-Tests-Disk), and leave the others as optional, loadable additions. That
> core would be sufficient to cover all the functionality provided by
> FileDirectory, and parts of the system that deal with files can be gradually
> migrated over.
>
> I wrote a couple of paragraphs on why it wouldn't make sense to have an
> implementation FileDirectory as a layer on top of Filesystem, but then I
> came to the conclusion that it might not be a bad idea after all. The devil
> is in the details, and we ought to look into the details. Either way, the
> current implementation of FileDirectory should eventually be available as a
> loadable package, so that we can still build images with legacy code that
> depends on it.
>
> Also, I wanted to point out that FS-AnsiStreams is basically obsolete. I
> wrote it because FileStream and friends couldn't be adapted to work with
> non-disk filesystems, and I wanted to have a single, uniform interface for
> reading and writing files, regardless of the type of filesystem that
> contained them. But then I discovered that Xtreams already does a way better
> job of that than anything I could have written. There might be some value in
> FS-AnsiStreams as an ANSI-compliant portability interface, but AFAICT, no
> dialect supports this part of the ANSI standard correctly anyway, so it
> wouldn't be much use.

And that's pretty much most of the reason for Martin & Mark writing
Xtreams - noone implemented streams in quite the same way (and there
were things that were just wrong in the spec, but can't recall the
details).

frank


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