Re: port-filename and path canonicalization

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>]

() Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>
() Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:42:58 +0200

   I'd be happy to have some cleaner solution, though.
   Do you have any ideas?

Another idea is to conceptually separate "filename" to be "directory"
and "basename" and have file ports maintain the directory portion as a
file descriptor (or equivalent) internally, exposed through some kind of
opaque handle.

With this separation, one can start to play with other virtualized
location schemes (FUSE, tarball, network byte stream, VMS-style logical
names, etc), while also addressing the actual need directly: finding
"neighbors" of the already opened file.

One (important for users' software freedom) neighbor is the source code;
others might be debugging info, runtime stats (thinking of future JIT),
previous versions (for ABI negotiation/fallback), and so on.

If the separation is applied earlier, that is, if directory objects can
be made without opening a file, you get "browsing".

FWIW, in Guile 1.4.x, i was headed towards this with module catalogs
(inspired by SLIB's catalog system), but it is not yet fully realized,
and might never be.  Perhaps i can move some of that to Guile 1.9.

thi