Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH 3/4] Remove ##sys#expand-home-path.

[Felix]

From: Peter Bex <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH 3/4] Remove ##sys#expand-home-path.
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:22:12 +0100

> On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 02:03:41PM -0400, Mario Domenech Goulart wrote:
>> Maybe I'm too paranoid?  Or missing something?
> 
> No, you're spot on.  I think given a choice, we should always err on
> the side of security and adhere to the Principle Of Least Astonishment.
> 
> For convenient scripting, a "dwim" egg could be created that does all
> these dangerous but convenient things.  Then this is the user's
> responsibility and if his system gets owned it wasn't due to a chicken
> fuck-up.
> 
> Implicitly "convenient" behaviour is the root of all evil.  We recently
> had the same discussion about substring; there is no easy way to build
> the sane features on top of an API with bells and whistles, except by
> adding lots of checks all over the place, as you pointed out in your
> example.  Building those convenience layers on top of the core, stable
> functionality is easily done, and can be wrapped up as an egg.

I disagree. We can still try to make the core system practical,
instead of a mindless API server for low-level facilities wrapped in
s-expression syntax. So lets for once try to find a solution without
just being polemic (well, polemics is great fun, of course, but in
this case it doesn't help).

I suggest keeping the posix file-operations convenience-free (they
duplicate a lot of the higher-level facilities anyway), while standard
procedures and core-unit file-system operations could provide ...
I barely dare to say it ... ~-expansion.

How crazy. Remember SISC? It extended file-operations to cover all
sorts of URIs in general. Nobody ever complained, AFAICT.  A bunch of
programming languages special-case filename-syntax like "|...",
running a command in a pipe. Quite convenient, I say, even if a bit of
a hack (I'm not suggesting this particular kind of behaviour, of
course. Just in case someone gets this wrong, which seems to be
happening a lot, recently...).


cheers,
felix