Re: Apache Portable Runtime

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

> RL> Are these really too expensive to retrieve, compared with the 
> overhead of a scripting language? Otherwise, it's probably easier all 
> round to just retrieve all of them.
>
> I've considered this myself and this is the approach Perl, Python and 
> Ruby have taken. However apr_stat() also returns permissions which I 
> represent in three tables, user, group and world.

You might want to reconsider that. It is certainly a clean interface, 
but it might not be particularly useful in common cases. Off the top of 
my head, I'd say the common cases are: checking one or two permissions,
and reporting all the permissions in some string representation.

Now, consider these possibilities:

local stat = apr.stat(filename)

if stat.perms.world.readable then ... end
-- or
if stat.worldperms:match"r" then ... end

Just a thought.

> Now if someone needs 
> just the mtime of say a 1000 files this will require 4000 tables while a 
> 1000 lua_Number's would have sufficed. My current implementation, 
> apr.stat(path, what), has two modes: if just one property is requested, 
> this is the property returned. More than one property means a table is 
> returned. This works really well for filesystem-entry-type testing, for 
> example:
>
> if apr.stat(path, 't') == 'directory' then ...

At the risk of entering into PHP-land, I'd suggest that
  if apr.filetype(path) == 'directory' then ...
is clearer. But I certainly wouldn't extend that to an "is_directory" 
boolean. :)

I don't like functions which sometimes return tables and sometimes not; 
that's error-prone and confusing to the user.

> And I'm *certainly* not going to implement 
> filectime/filemtime/fileatime/file_exists/file_readable/is_directory/etc.. 
> functions like PHP has :P

Sure. Probably only a couple are useful; the rest could be extracted 
from the general interface which returns a table.