[armedbear-devel] HEADS UP: CL:DIRECTORY :RESOLVE-SYMLINKS default changed to nil

[Ville Voutilainen]

On 30 January 2014 16:48, Ville Voutilainen <ville.voutilainen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30 January 2014 16:14, Mark Evenson <evenson at panix.com> wrote:
>> With a (hopefully) carefully done refactoring of the underlying Pathname.listDirectory() routine, the semantics of CL:DIRECTORY are now:
>>
>>   (PATHSPEC &KEY (RESOLVE-SYMLINKS NIL))
>
>
> I vaguely remember why I made resolve-symlinks default to T, and I think it was
> because sbcl seemed to do so. I advise caution with such semantics changes,
> I think we had some libraries that went nuts if the default wasn't T. I can't
> remember the details, though.

Oh. Now that I think about it, it probably wasn't any sbcl
compatibility thing, but
rather that our older DIRECTORY implementation semantics before resolve-symlinks
was introduced were so that, well, symlinks were resolved. Therefore we,
at the time, wanted to preserve those semantics. I think that means it
should probably
be ok to change the default.


I think if ASDF is ok with the change, it should be safe. I have a
vague recollection
that the whole facility of being able to specify resolve-symlinks, and
specifically
set it to NIL was because ASDF needed it. That also suggests that defaulting
to NIL is just better.