Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from April 2008
* Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl> [2008-04-28 12:25]: > I would propose to a) cleary define the desired semantics of > copy and b) implement this. There is no need for a BUFFERSIZE > argument. It lets the user trade speed for memory or vice versa. It’s not terribly useful, no, but it doesn’t exactly seem harmful either (modulo accepting 0 as a buffer size and successfully doing nothing in that case). > There is no need for syscopy, copy should do the right job. If File::Copy hadn’t been around for such a long time, agreed. However, the old API is what it is. > There's no need for a cp alias. I don’t see any reason to throw it out and to old Unix hands it’s nice to have around. What about it irks you? > Increase the version number to 3.00. Automatically provide the > new semantics if the user explicitly requires the new version: > > use File::Copy 3.0; That is not functionally different from my proposal of allowing `syscopy` to be imported as `copy`, other than the fact that the import argument is a meaningless number as opposed to an at least somewhat descriptive name. If you really want a new and simpler API, I submit that a new module name is a better way of handling that. But the old File::Copy API should still be fixed, as far as it can be. > As a side note: Wouldn't we all have a good laugh when, say, > Microsoft, wrote in the docs: > > [...] also provides the syscopy routine, which copies [...] > preserving OS-specific attributes and file structure. For Unix > systems, this is equivalent to the simple copy routine, which > doesn't preserve OS-specific attributes. > > This is just stupid. Of course. That’s why I say that on Unix, `syscopy` should DTRT as far as it can. It can’t do a complete job – eg. I doubt it’ll ever be able to copy XFS attributes of HFS+ resource forks. For apps to be able to copy files accurately without knowing the implementation details of every single possible filesystem, the filesystem has to provide a copy call. But Unix does not define such an interface, which is of course why `syscopy` has always been a synonym for `copy` on Unix. But even so,the system interface situation is not going to improve, and at the same time, to a certain known extent the Unix model is universal across filesystems in Unix, so File::Copy is not merely punting but actively refusing to be helpful. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>Thread Previous | Thread Next