From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@...>
Date: 2002-01-24T12:45:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Minor thoughts on 'Find' module

At 5:56 AM +0900 1/24/02, Michael Witrant wrote:
>On Wed, 23 Jan, matz@ruby-lang.org (Yukihiro Matsumoto) wrote:
>
>  > Could you propose the possible API of the "new Find"?

I am new to ruby, so I am not sure what the most-natural API would
be.  Something like the following sounds okay to me, although I do
not think there should be a default setting for 'root'.  I think
the programmer should explicitly specify the root, even if it is
just ".".  I believe that is how the current Find.find works, and it
seems right to me.

>What about Find.find(root = '.', *options)?
>
>Options could be symbols or hashes. Each symbol is converted to a
>hash like { :symbol => true }. Options are then flattened and
>converted to a unique hash. Some options could be compatible,
>some not.

The current Find allows for multiple directory names to be given
on the call to Find.find.  I do not know if the above does.  (As I
said, I am still pretty new to ruby... :-).

>Possible options:
>   :files_first
>   :directories_first
>   :depth_first
>   :files_only
>   :directories_only
>   :match => regexp
>   :follow_symlinks
>   :max_depth => integer
>   :without_root # this one would delete the provided root
>                 # from the returned/yielded file names
>   ...
>And why not all those wonderfull options find(1) provides?

I would suggest options of 'directories_first' and 'directories_last',
because that avoids the question of how things like symlinks, sockets,
or named-pipes would be treated under "files_first".

Similarly, I would suggest "directories_only" and "no_directories"
(unless "files_only" really means only files, and it would not send
to the block any names which are symlinks, sockets, or named-pipes).

I do not think "match" makes sense.  That can just as easily be done
within the code-block that the caller specifies.  It seems like more
overhead to pass the pattern into Find for Find to process, than it
would be for the code-block to do the same processing.

>Also, without block given, it should return an array of those files.

This sounds reasonable to me, although I am not sure that I would
use it much.
   - - -
Let me think about this some more.  The more I think about it, the
more I think I want to make a significantly different suggestion.
I have not figured out all the details of what I want to suggest.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu