Re: proposal: with-file-writeable

[Gábor Boskovits]

2018-02-15 0:28 GMT+01:00 Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden>:

Gábor Boskovits <address@hidden> skribis:

> the make-file-writeable function seems a bit too imperative to me, it would
> look better if we could have a with-file-writeable function, so that we can
> constrain the size effect, and more. Moreover if a file is read-only to
> start with, it might be a good idea to keep it that way anyways. WDYT?

Now that I found the function in (guix build utils) (thanks for guiding
me!), I see what you mean.  ‘make-file-writable’ is imperative, true,
but I’d say that file system operations are imperative in nature.

A ‘with-file-writeable’ form would give a false sense of “containment” I
think.  Contrary to what the name suggests, its effect would *not* be
limited to the dynamic extent of its body, in the current thread;
instead, the effect would be globally visible on the system.

Last, the style of (guix build utils) is a lesser concern in a way
because its primary use case is package builds.  All this code is
“plumbing” and mostly imperative.

So, all in all, I’d rather keep it this way.

Thoughts?

Ok, the keep it this way. Another question, this came up, as

I was trying to find a nice solution to reset-gzip-timestamps failing.

I got different pieces of advice if I should reset the permissions after

resetting the timestamp, but I'm still not sure. It seems that the easiest

way to this would be to just add a call to make-file-writable to the phase

at the beginning, as we finally end up with a read-only one in the store

anyway. I feel that reseting the permissions is unneccesary additional

complexity. WDYT?

 

Ludo’.