From: Joel VanderWerf <joelvanderwerf@...>
Date: 2012-01-26T11:18:15+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] "files" gem - for creating temporary files and dirs

On 01/25/2012 04:50 PM, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 7:13 AM, Joel VanderWerf
> <joelvanderwerf@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Here's another way to do it. (FSDB does a lot of other stuff, too...)
>
> Without looking, I'm going to guess that you created that library,
> Joel.  That immediately assures me of its quality, but I found some of
> the API a little unwieldy.

Yeah, it's kind of ancient (c. 2003) and could use some redesign. I 
hadn't used it for a few years. and the formats api felt awkward to me, too.

Recently I needed it as a local alternative to Amazon S3, so at least 
it's 1.9.3 compatible, now.

>>
>> formats = [
>>   FSDB::TEXT_FORMAT.when(/\.txt$|\.html$/),
>>   FSDB::BINARY_FORMAT.when(/\.png$/)
>> ]
>
> formats = { /\.txt$|\.html$/ =>  :text, /\.png$/ =>  :binary }
>    # And should the programmer really have to specify these? Can't they
> be baked in?

The defaults could be better (currently the default is that .txt maps to 
TEXT_FORMAT and everything else is marshalled), but many formats don't 
have a unique ruby object representation: yaml files could be strings or 
objects, png could be binary strings or instances of somebody's PNG 
class.... Also, file extensions are not always how you want to 
discriminate; you might not even have file extensions, and use subdir 
location instead.

But it should definitely be easier to turn on common formats.

>>   img["hello.png"] = data["hello.png"]
>
> I don't get a sense of what that line is doing.

It's reading a binary string from data/hello.png and writing it back out 
to "#{dir}/img/hello.png". Which is potentially far less efficient than 
a file copy...

>> # you can automatically serialize objects in yaml, json, or marshal:
>> [...]
>>   json_format = FSDB::Format.new(
>>     /\.json$/, /\.js$/,
>>     :name =>  "JSON_FORMAT",
>>     :load =>  proc {|f| JSON.load(f)},
>>     :dump =>  proc {|object, f| f.syswrite(JSON.dump(object))}
>>   )
>>   tmp.formats = formats + [FSDB::YAML_FORMAT, json_format]
>
> Seems to me that building yaml, json and marshal capabilities into the
> library would be justified and worthwhile.

Sure...

> I'm starting work on a project involving a lot of file and directory
> manipulation, so I'll check out fsdb enthusiastically.

Great! Hope it's suitable, though it's not really a general purpose 
file/dir manager...