On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 10:45:16AM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
Hi David,
On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 5:45 AM, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:
On 15 Sep 2015, at 14:13, David T. Lewis <lewis@mail.msen.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 11:40:48AM +0200, Esteban Lorenzano wrote:
Pharo uses them.
Posix permissions are useful for both linux and mac. Windows uses also the posix permissions that came with MinGW??? I do
not think they are useful but we provide them anyway :)
Posix permissions are based on Unix, and are very platform specific. The Windows equivalents are semantically different, and other operating systems may exist that are not Unix based at all.
IMO, platform specific functions should go into separate plugins, and not in FilePlugin.
well, I disagree :) I do not find this approach practical??? because in general, there is no other systems that may exist using other permissions than POSIX. Except Windows, of course, but even for windows, there are compatibility layers that we can use. In the case of the FilePlugin extensions, we choose to stay POSIX because in general, as its been said before, the job of a virtual machine is been virtual: to provide an ???abstract machine??? common for everything in the image. I???m not saying that this is possible and even desirable in all cases, but it should be something to think about. In that case, we could design a common file permissions different to the one of Windows and different to POSIX, but I think POSIX does the job just fine.
Also, the choice was: POSIX or nothing (because we didn???t have anything before). I would be very happy if we agree in a better solution, and we implement it. But in the mean time, a not perfect solution is better than none.
I agree with Esteban. IMO, the model of files that the FilePlugin provides access to can and should be a superset of facilities. By not supporting facilities such as permissions or symbolic links or active mount-points we hobble our core file functionality and that makes us a very weak scripting platform. Putting these facilities in add-on packages makes configuration more difficult and means that an elegant implementation in the core file classes, with fallbacks for platforms that don't support the concepts, is very difficult.
I do not intend to suggest that these things are not wonderful and good and worthy of being done. What I said is that they should not be put into FilePlugin. Yes it is more difficult to implement features like this in packages, but with all due respect it's not all *that* terribly hard. And I think the too much work argument does not hold up when we are talking about something like FilePlugin that effectively defines minimal core functionality required to bring up an image on a new platform.
If we want to support unix-style scripting in Pharo and Squeak (and I think we very much do; there are many areas out there where good scripting is essential) then we need a better File model, and that means not just getting rid of FileDirectory et al, it also means providing the right infrastructure in the FilePlugin, and that means extensions like the one the Pharo VM folks made. Indeed they haven't gone nearly far enough IMO.
Again, I am not saying that these things should not be done. Just that with respect to platform-specific features that can only ever work on a Unix based system, allowing these to creep into the feature set of base system does not seem like a very good idea to me. That's all I am saying. Dave