Dear all,
I am tremendously happy to announce you that Pharo
Consortium will sponsor yet another development effort.
In this particular case, it's my honor to carry on such
an effort and I will be developing and improving a few
things and ideas. All the contract and paperwork has
already been done so it's time to start working.��
Regarding the developments itself, we discussed about
these topics:
1) Experiment with a simpler yet more limited
OSProcess alternative to execute OS commands.��
2) Improving FileSystem in order to better deal with
some POSIX stuff like symbolic links, unix file
permissions, etc etc.��
I have already started with 1). OSProcess is super
complete and it involves some packages (OSProcess /
CommandShell) as well as some VM plugins
(OSProcessPlugin, AIOPlugin). OSProcess provides lots of
features (like forking the running image) but we would
like to focus only in executing OS commands. In
addition, OSProcess dates from quite some years ago when
many of the current infrastructure features did not
exist yet.��
So the idea is to think a simpler alternative to
execute OS commands, using new features such as threaded
FFI (for example, for reading async from pipes), pinned
objects, etc. We want to use FFI as much as possible
rather than VM plugins.��
From the image side, we are thinking about an API
which would look like a builder-like API (FileSystem,
XStream, etc).��
We have been discussing with David Lewis (OSProcess
author) as well as with Eliot Miranda, Esteban
Lorenzano, Damien Pollet, Stephane Ducasse, etc in order
to agree in a project that would be worth doing
(otherwise we would continue using existing tools). And
they have all been very kind with me providing positive
discussions.��
I will soon do a survey to measure the most common
use cases of OSProcess and related tools.
If you have any thought, question, feedback, or
whatever, please let us know.��
Finally, note that I will be doing this project
together with another client's project (Quuve) and my
life does not have much free time these days...so please
be patient!!!
Best,