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bug#44186: Recursive mkdir
From: |
divoplade |
Subject: |
bug#44186: Recursive mkdir |
Date: |
Sun, 25 Oct 2020 11:44:46 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Evolution 3.34.2 |
So, after a bit of bikeshedding on #guile, it turns out that the
controversy moved to the second commit.
Here is the justification for it.
When a program user wants to save data to a file, if the place where to
save the file does not exist yet, there will be an error: "cannot
create file or directory". That's puzzling to the user, because, yes,
the user wants to create that file. If the error is a little more
precise, it will be something in the line of "Please create directory
blah/blah/blah before invoking this program".
So, the user will wonder why the program was not able to create
blah/blah/blah itself, create it, and re-run the program. This is more
work for the user, work that could have been easily handled by the
program.
Good behaving programs should (recursively) create the directory before
trying to write to a file specified by the user. That include log files
for a daemon, for instance. Emacs org-mode babel tangling uses a
:mkdirp t for a similar reason. In order to simplify the development of
such programs, and in order to avoid bugs where the developer forgot to
call (mkdir-recursive (dirname output-file)) before (open-output-file,
call-with-output-file or with-output-to-file, while still keeping
compatibility of the other programs, I propose to add a keyword
argument to these functions.
There are also worries that this keyword will not be of much use and
will clutter the implementation. I am willing to bet that this keyword
will be more used than, for instance, #:guess-encoding, which is
available in all the corresponding input functions.
I also simplified the mkdir-recursive function, to be closer to
https://gitlab.com/leoprikler/guile-filesystem/-/blob/master/ice-9/filesystem.scm
.
0002-Use-the-recursive-mkdir-function-in-file-output-proc.patch
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0001-ports-Add-mkdir-recursive.patch
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bug#44186: Recursive mkdir, Leo Prikler, 2020/10/26