Re: [PATCH v2 5/8] builtins/source: parse the -i option

[Koichi Murase]

2024年5月21日(火) 14:56 Phi Debian <phi.debian@gmail.com>:
> Apparently konsolebox wrote a package manager, and survived the source 'as
> is', yet he still advocate for 'enhancement'. I do have a package manager
> too, and survived source 'as is' and don't require any enhancement.

I'm not sure if it is the case for konsolebox, but I think it is valid
to suggest including the features that turned out to be useful in
maintaining a package manager as built-in ones. Those suggested
features are meant to replicate the useful part of the features of the
package manager, so it is not surprising that the suggested features
are not needed for the package manager itself.

That said, I think it would be difficult to reach an agreement on the
detailed behavior of the suggested features to make them consistent
with many existing package managers.

> 'May be' bash could investigate the ksh93/zsh $FPATH autoload, but don't
> know if that would be good enough for the initial purpose.

There are already shell-function implementations at
/examples/functions/autoload* in the Bash source. They reference FPATH
to load functions, though one needs to call `autoload' for each
function in advance (by e.g. `autoload "$fpath_element"/*' ).

However, I personally do not think the FPATH mechanism is useful
because a file can only contain one function per file. Significantly
non-trivial functions are usually implemented by a set of helper
functions or sub-functions. Also, in libraries, we usually have a set
of functions that are closely related to one another and share the
implementations. I don't think it is practical to split those
functions into dozens or hundreds of files. It would also be slow to
read many different files, which requires access to random positions
on the disk.

--
Koichi