[squeak-dev] FileSystem

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Fri May 24 08:58:15 UTC 2013


So Metacello is being forced, along with many other packages, to
re-implement a compatibility layer because Squeak uses FileDirectory
and Pharo uses FileSystem.

Now I completely understand that Pharo's understanding of
FileDirectory is about 5 years out of date. By now, countless
arguments on pharo-dev have shown that the two packages are roughly
isomorphic in functionality and API.

Camillo Bruni's even shown this by implementing a shim exposing a
FIleDirectory API on top of FileSystem to ease migration of early
Pharo projects to later versions of Pharo.

So I have a pair of questions:
* how far have wiresong's FileSystem and Pharo's FileSystem diverged?
(And how do we bring the two back together again, if necessary?)
* How do we fix the problem?

Pharo has nearly emptied the open source Smalltalk room of oxygen, so
there's an argument for saying that FileSystem has won and we should
use it. If we did move to FileSystem we _would_ want to keep Cami's
shim, because we care about backwards compatibility a whole lot more
than Pharo. And of course there's Cuis to consider.

Thoughts?

(Note: please _don't_ talk about the spilt more than absolutely
necessary. It's done, it can't be undone, and we should concentrate
our energies on moving Squeak forward, and minimising pain for those
brave souls who try keep their packages cross platform.)

frank


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