Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: directory/truename transition

[Bill Page]

On 03 Jul 2007 23:25:17 -0400, Camm Maguire wrote:
> ...
> This is all quite depressing.  It appears the clspec is quite
> deficient in this regard.  Hence, I think the proper goal for GCL is
> to be as close to posix and "intuition" in this regard while still
> passing the spec.

+1 for supporting posix.

> The whole goal was 1) to support pathnames with spaces, ala mingw, and
> 2) to provide some natural means within the spec for distinguishing a
> directory from a file.  clisp seems appropriate for this, but does not
> allow one to overlay delete-file et. al. for directories.  This does
> seem a good tradeoff on reflection, as any general overlay is going to
> run afoul of all sorts of problems trying to #'open a directory and
> #'read therefrom.  If this perspective is the right one, all the spec
> functions but #'directory should work only on files, and GCL should
> provide functions in 'si to do the directory manipulations outside the
> spec.

Yes.

> As they are outside the spec, is there any reason not to implement
> these where possible with #'system?  The bourne shell is likely at
> least as portable as GCL is.  I was worried about the following
> directory implementation:
>
>         sprintf(command, "shopt -s dotglob; "
>                          "IFS='' j=\"%s\"; for i in $j ; do ! [ -e \"$i\" ] || %c [ -d \"$i\" 
> ] || echo \"$i\" ; done", filename, ch);
>
> but I think it likely that this will even work on mingw.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "work". At the present time gcl
builds on MSYS/mingw as a *native* Windows application. MSYS/mingw is
only required to build gcl from source. Standard native windows does
not have any of these unix-oriented #system tools. Doing what you
suggest would result in gcl only working from within the MSYS/mingw
shell.

Of course there is also the issue of gcc on Windows which is needed
when compiling. In the case of installing a native Windows Axiom, the
install program includes the bare minimum mingw gcc components in a
separate directory along with Axiom. Installation of mingw is not a
prerequisite.

Although it requires a little more knowledge of Windows internals, I
strongly recommend that gcl on windows continue to call the windows
API instead of relying on external support for posix/unix commands in
a particular shell that is not native to Windows. For similar reasons
I also would not recommend trying to utilize the Windows non-posix
command interpreter for this purpose.

Regards,
Bill Page.