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List:       squeak-dev
Subject:    Re: [squeak-dev] ServerDirectory example login is dead
From:       tim Rowledge <tim () rowledge ! org>
Date:       2017-12-27 22:59:13
Message-ID: 506BE41F-8F80-4A04-BC75-AA5744246600 () rowledge ! org
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> On 27-12-2017, at 3:36 AM, Jakob Reschke <forums.jakob@resfarm.de> wrote:
> 
> I have not thoroughly investigated this, but this could be a case for the \
> FileSystem API that Pharo has adopted as the default file accessing API. You do not \
> pass file names around there, but references that are (path + the FileSystem in \
> which they resolve). That way, the information that the gif lives remotely is not \
> lost. Each FileSystem is then responsible for file name conversion and encoding if \
> required.

That's certainly one option and potentially a very good one. I've always hated the \
way that raw strings have ended up as the ‘normal' way to refer to file locations. \
It got even worse with UTF-8 getting mixed in. There's a lot to be said for having \
fairly use-specific objects to refer to file locations; it might be smart to have \
platform specific classes not just for the differing separators, length limits and so \
on, but as a way to help translating between OS as an image is moved around. As a \
current example, the Turing talk image Yoshiki just mentioned has a link to a movie \
file at C:\something or other; a way to meaningfully convert that would be very nice \
for Mac & linux (and RISC OS!) users. Another option is to have an abstracted form \
that works from one or more known locations - the default directory is one obvious \
starting point - and doesn't particularly use any  OS idea of format but can be \
converted easily. How about "(FileSystem defaultDir up up up dir: ‘wibble' \
dir:'splot') fileNames" instead of "(FileDirectory default directoryNamed: \
‘../../../wibble/splot') fileNames ?

An interesting option we have these days because of the common requirement for UTF-8 \
filenames etc is that, since we have to convert the string anyway, building a single \
platform format string from a collection of path components no longer seems like an \
insane amount of work to do for a ‘mere file name call'.

One of our problems is that people have got so used to thinking of filenames as just \
strings that they can append to or trim. It will be hard to get us to use anything \
else, no matter how much better it can be demonstrated to be.

Another problem is illustrated quite well by the horrible ways we have to guard so \
many methods in FileDirectory against nasty file paths being thrown around. Consider  \
FileDirectory default directoryNamed: '/home' -> UnixFileDirectory on '/home' In \
order to support that we have to check the given local file name for all sorts of \
cruft. This may well be repeated half a dozen times in a single interaction with a \
file and if a hard-coded OS inappropriate string is used we can really get messed up. \
Proper private methods and actual APIs might help a bit here.

A different option that I suppose might seem more familiar to a lot of people would \
be to adopt the URI style and end up with things like \
ftp:blob:wiblley2@thingummy.org//a/b/c.gif (or whatever the syntax actually is)

Whichever path we take I really hope we can build a better selection of name handling \
capabilities; working on the FileChooserDialog etc has really been quite annoying; \
oh, we can get the extension of a file name... and the local name, and the basename, \
but wait that includes the path… 

On the plus side, I did manage to get the basics of remote directories working within \
the FileChooserDialog yesterday but I'm loathe to include it since the operations \
seem so terribly slow. Part of it is a side-effect of our LazyList morphs compounded \
by slow ftp responses. Another part is the problem of a remote file name not getting \
parsed if we try to do FileDirectory fileNamed: ‘rowledge.org//tag-comment.gif'


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Permanently out to lunch.


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