Re: [expath] File Module

I'm happy to go with these incompatible changes, but I really would like to see real focus now on getting specs frozen at 1.0 level where implementors and users can have confidence in their stability.

Michael Kay
Saxonica


On 29 Nov 2013, at 15:55, Christian Grün <christian.gruen@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> after more than two years, the EXPath File Module is about to be
> finished. I have just put the latest versions of the spec online
> (including the diff):
> 
>  http://files.basex.org/publications/expath.org/spec/file.html
>  http://files.basex.org/publications/expath.org/spec/file-diff.html
> 
> Thanks to John Lumley, and other people on our own mailing list, who
> have given us helpful feedback. Our plan was to avoid major changes to
> the spec, due to its advanced state, but I think the feedback should
> not be simply discarded:
> 
> 1) The vintage Linux commands "dirname" and "basename" have also been
> adopted to the spec, but it has turned out it’s not only the wording
> that’s unfortunate (in most cases, dir-name() does not return a name,
> but rather the path to a directory). We would thus like to drop these
> two functions and instead introduce the following alternatives:
> 
> SIGNATURE
>  file:parent($path as xs:string) as xs:string?
> DESCRIPTION
>  Returns the parent directory of a file or directory. – An empty
> sequence is returned if the path points to a root directory, or if it
> contains no directory separators. – This function is ·deterministic·
> (no path existence check is made).
> 
> SIGNATURE
>  file:name($path as xs:string) as xs:string
> DESCRIPTION
>  Returns the name of a file or directory. – An empty string is
> returned if the path points to the root directory, or if it contains
> no directory separators. – This function is ·deterministic· (no path
> existence check is made).
> 
> 2) Florent suggested to replace the existing error codes with his new
> EXPath naming conventions:
> 
>  http://www.w3.org/community/expath/wiki/Naming
> 
> I first resisted, as the File Module is already used in the wild, but
> if we decide to replace the functions mentioned above, it would be
> just consequent to also make the codes more accessible.
> 
> If everyone agrees to the two changes, I will once more update the
> spec and hope that we can release it as official EXPath Proposed
> Module.
> 
> Thanks for your attention,
> Christian
> 
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "EXPath" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to expath+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to expath@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/expath.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

Received on Friday, 29 November 2013 16:22:46 UTC