Re: Unzipping content into current directory widely considered poor practice

Hi Dan,

Thanks for you comment. WebApps welcomes comments for any of its  
specs at any time.

You are correct, however, that your comment below missed the LC#3  
comment deadline and as such will not be  reflected in CR#2. However,  
we will discuss your e-mail and depending upon the results of that  
discussion, it may be reflected in the publication that follows CR#2.

-Regards, Art Barstow

On Nov 20, 2009, at 3:48 AM, ext Dan Brickley wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I understand from http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-widgets-20091029/ that
> this is the place to direct my feedback on the widget packaging spec,
> and that I have missed the Last Call deadline by one day. I hope you
> will consider my plea anyway, since it is based on evaluation of an
> implementation I only discovered last night. See below for an issue I
> tried to raise with the implementor.
>
> It seems W3C Widget zip packages unload a mess of several files in the
> current working directory when unzipped.
>
> This is unfortunate and I urge you to consider a design that allows
> things to be kept in a single subdirectory.
>
> 1. the dominant convention in modern software development is that you
> can safely unwrap a .zip or .tar.gz in the current working directory,
> in the expectation that you'll find only a sensibly named
> subdirectory. Those who violate this expectation are often seen as
> making a basic beginners mistake. Encoding such a 'mistake' in a W3C
> REC both looks bad, and encourages bad practice.
>
> 2. by risking a mixup between pre-existing files and those from the
> archive file, we introduce the risk of confusion and inclarity, making
> widgets ever slightly harder to learn from. And or those who do try to
> learn from others works, we reward them by making a mess of their
> filetree. Assuming 1000 new developers decide each day to explore W3C
> Widget technology and learn by example, I expect 900+ of them will
> come with the reasonable assumption that a zip file can be safely
> unpacked in a directory that has already got other stuff in it
> (including possibly files with common names like index.html). Mixing
> up files will be annoying; accidentally overwriting files will be
> infuriating....
>
> 3. Are we confident that all unzip tools will ask nicely before
> overwriting existing files? A quick test on my machine at least gave
> me a warning.
>
> eg.
> TellyClub:~ danbri$ mkdir w3ctest
> TellyClub:~ danbri$ cd w3ctest/
> TellyClub:w3ctest danbri$ echo '<html6>my original valuable html
> document</>' > index.html
> TellyClub:w3ctest danbri$ curl -Os http://berjon.com/tmp/a-widget.wgt
> TellyClub:w3ctest danbri$ unzip a-widget.wgt
> Archive:  a-widget.wgt
>   inflating: config.xml
>   inflating: icon.svg
>    creating: img/
>   inflating: img/me.jpg
> replace index.html? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename:
>
>
> Thanks for considering my request.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From:  <widgeon@googlecode.com>
> Date: Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 9:24 AM
> Subject: Re: Issue 4 in widgeon: test widget unzips in current  
> directory
> To: danbrickley@gmail.com
>
>
> Updates:
>        Status: Invalid
>
> Comment #1 on issue 4 by robin.berjon: test widget unzips in  
> current directory
> http://code.google.com/p/widgeon/issues/detail?id=4
>
> That is something that is imposed on us by the Widgets spec, so  
> you'd have to
> complain to Marcos I'm afraid.
>
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Received on Friday, 20 November 2009 16:10:33 UTC