YAQAGV (Yet Another Question About Global Variables)

[Steven W. Orr]

I made a decision to implement the require module written by Noah Friedman 
that comes in the examples part of the bash distro. This is the trick for 
implementing the provide / require functionality of features.

I love it. It works great. I just ran into one little snag. Not a show 
stopper, but I'm wondering if there's a better way to deal with it.

Some of the modules I have are designated as library modules, and so are used 
as args to require. Since require is a function, any variables that are 
declared in a required module which declare global variables using typeset 
then become local variables to the require function. Then after the modules 
are loaded, the variables that used to be global are gone.

I went through the library modules and removed the typeset commands from all 
of the global variables and that seems to fix it. What got lost however was 
the functional part of the typset commands. For example, a variable was 
declared as

typeset -a foo=( abc def ghi )
and now it has to be changed to
foo=( abc def ghi )

No big loss. But I also had some things declared as constants or integers (or 
both).

typeset -i x1=44
typeset -ir x2=55

I'm not 100% sure that that won't break something, but for now I'm just glad 
that they didn't go out of scope.

Is there a trick to allow declarations like I used to do in a module and 
preserve their characteristics if they are sourced in from inside a function?

If there's an answer, I'll get it here.

TIA

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