[Openmcl-devel] require and alias files

[Gary Byers]

On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, John DeSoi wrote:

> In my init file I have:
>
> (pushnew #4p"lisplib:_modules;" *module-search-path*)
>
>
> The _modules folder has aliases to all of the module files. In
> calling require, OpenMCL just returns the module string without
> following the alias and loading the file. Bug?

I think that the behavior of "just returning the module string"
is what happens when you successfully load a 0-length file; in the
Darwin layer, a MacOS alias isn't distinguishable from a 0-length
file.  (The information that opaquely identifies the target of
an alias is stored in the alias file's resource fork.)

I made an alias of "ccl:bindarwin;eval.dfsl" in the Finder, then
in the shell, I did:

[~/ccl/bindarwin] gb at dervish> ls -l eval.dfsl*
-rw-r--r--  1 gb  wheel  75622 Aug 18 20:03 eval.dfsl
-rw-r--r--  1 gb  wheel      0 Aug 30 17:44 eval.dfsl alias

Obviously, the bit of information that distinguishes a MacOS alias
>from a regular file is stored -somewhere-, but I don't believe that
it's stored anywhere where a Darwin program (like ls or openmcl or
cat or ...) can easily get at it.

To answer your question: I don't think that it's a good thing that
someone trying to do what you're doing should have it fail silently
and mysteriously, but I don't think that it's a bug that a Darwin
program doesn't recognize file attribute information that isn't
available to it.


>
> Thanks,
>
> John DeSoi, Ph.D.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Openmcl-devel at clozure.com
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>
>


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