Re: Ada.Directories problems, a summary

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2009 05:47:13 -0800 (PST), Ivan Levashew wrote:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
>> After experimenting with Ada.Directories I collected the issues I think
>> must be addressed to make Ada.Directories more usable:
> 
> Ada RTL isn't enough (and wasn't ever) to do anything serious.

I hope running Ada programs qualifies as serious. (:-))

> I think a replacement library should be designed, with
> OS-specific and fallback (relying on Ada RTL) implementations.

Nope, Ada RTL must support design of platform-independent applications. Any
OS-specific library has no use in my eyes. I think there is a broad
understanding of this beyond Ada community. As an example consider GTK
introducing GIO library which tries to abstract the I/O OS layer. [GIO does
not work, but that is another story...]

> Your problems are not the only ones. For example, with Ada and
> GNAT RTL, I can't easily:
> Read word by word a file,

I don't see any problem with that. Ada.Streams.Stream_IO should do it.

> which is stored in a zip file,
> which itself is hosted on an FTP server,
> which is being accessed through a SOCKS5 proxy,
> which is being accessed through an HTTPS proxy (CONNECT method),
> which is being accessed directly.

All these are just not files. It is a UNIX-world aberration that everything
must be a file. Everything is nothing.

> Every part of Ada RTL and GNAT RTL is locked down to immediate
> filesystem/immediate network connectivity.

Which is good, because your list has no end. What about CORBA, DB
connections etc?

> I can't see any option other than another library.

The option is to limit it to files. Later on URI schemes could added in a
set of separate packages and so on.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de