[armedbear-devel] Proposal for URL to be used as Pathnames

[Alan Ruttenberg]

On Friday, March 26, 2010, Kevin Reid <kpreid at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 26, 2010, at 4:34, Mark Evenson wrote:
>
>> I've [committed to an initial design][1] for URLs to be used as
>> Pathnames, which I am in the process of implementing.  The primary use
>> of this functionality will be to be able to eventually express OSGi
>> bundles within ASDF system definitions.
>
>
> Two general comments without having looked at the code or the
> mentioned paper:
>
>    * Make sure you're not assuming *too much* about URL syntax; stick to
>      what's stated in the URI Generic Syntax RFC and/or particular
> scheme
>      RFCs.
>
>      In particular, make sure you're correctly handling the 'reserved'
>      characters and not making too many assumptions about what is
>      equivalent, or about what cannot occur.
>
>    * On the other hand, it would seem natural that a pathname with, say,
>      directory (:ABSOLUTE "qty" "1/2 lb") should become the URL
>        whatever://.../qty/1%2F2%20lb/
>      i.e., the user should be able to ignore the encoding/syntax/
>      escaping issues of URLs when working with them in a data structure.
>      But this may conflict with being able to handle the reserved
>      characters unambiguously. The central question is "What does % mean
>      in a PATHNAME-component string?". Make sure that the answer is
>      consistent.

The reserved characters are scheme specific. I'd suggest that there be
a generic function eql dispatch on the scheme to compute namestrings.

Will the logical pathname system interact with URL pathnames? I'm
thinking I could probably make use of the analogy between prefixes and
logical hosts.

-Alan


>
> --
> Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>
>
>
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