[Openmcl-devel] Lisp image filename.

[Gary Byers]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, David Brown wrote:

> Is there any particular reason for the distinction on darwin of naming
> the image by tacking an ".image" onto the filename, and other
> platforms that use an equivalent named file in uppercase?

Lack of foresight, mostly.  Inertia factors into it, too: there are a
handful (maybe a few handfuls ...) of places in the code and
documentation that "know" that some platforms use the case-inversion
convention and others use ".image".  There have always been exceptions
to assumptions about a platform's case-sensitivity (it's usually an
attribute of the filesystem, not of the OS), and those exceptions are
likely to get more common.  Using the ".image" convention on all
platforms (as you propose) makes sense and I agree that it's worth
doing, but the change will probably be at least a little disruptive.
(Not so disruptive that it shouldn't be done, but at least a little
disruptive.)

>
> The reason I ask is that I commonly work on Linux images running in a
> VM on MacOS.  Generally, my home directory is just mapped through to
> the underlying HFS filesystem.  With the case-paired filenames, I'm
> not able to store CCL in my home directory, but must expand it
> somewhere in a native filesystem.
>
> It seems like things would be simpler overall to just use an extension
> on the name, and allow things to work on any platform, even if the
> filesystem happens to be case insensitive.
>
> Thanks,
> David Brown
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