Re: Status of lposix?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> The historical example which usually gets dragged up in such
> conversations is something like VMS.

Ah, brief attack of nostalgia.  I liked the automatic file versioning,
and the script language was very expressive.

> Maybe you don't care about that, but if it's possible to specify a more
> abstract operation that can support such OSes, without being harder to
> understand/use, that's a good thing (and if it's actually _easier_ to
> understand/use, even better).

Yes, this is a cool vision. But I think when we speak of 'portability'
we usually mean 'works on Windows and Unix'. It's a pragmatic goal.

> Also, it seems the above two calls are confusingly non-orthogonal --
> one is "combine two pathnames", the other is "combine two pathnames and
> also do syntactic simplications".  Why not instead just have a "combine
> two pathnames" and a "simplify" function, which could be used in
> conjunction if desired?

Absolutely. That's precisely what would be meant by having a minimal
set of composable operations.

steve d.