From: Peter Bex <peter....@xs4all.nl> Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH 3/4] Remove ##sys#expand-home-path. Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:22:12 +0100
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 02:03:41PM -0400, Mario Domenech Goulart wrote: >> Maybe I'm too paranoid? Or missing something? > > No, you're spot on. I think given a choice, we should always err on > the side of security and adhere to the Principle Of Least Astonishment. > > For convenient scripting, a "dwim" egg could be created that does all > these dangerous but convenient things. Then this is the user's > responsibility and if his system gets owned it wasn't due to a chicken > fuck-up. > > Implicitly "convenient" behaviour is the root of all evil. We recently > had the same discussion about substring; there is no easy way to build > the sane features on top of an API with bells and whistles, except by > adding lots of checks all over the place, as you pointed out in your > example. Building those convenience layers on top of the core, stable > functionality is easily done, and can be wrapped up as an egg. I disagree. We can still try to make the core system practical, instead of a mindless API server for low-level facilities wrapped in s-expression syntax. So lets for once try to find a solution without just being polemic (well, polemics is great fun, of course, but in this case it doesn't help). I suggest keeping the posix file-operations convenience-free (they duplicate a lot of the higher-level facilities anyway), while standard procedures and core-unit file-system operations could provide ... I barely dare to say it ... ~-expansion. How crazy. Remember SISC? It extended file-operations to cover all sorts of URIs in general. Nobody ever complained, AFAICT. A bunch of programming languages special-case filename-syntax like "|...", running a command in a pipe. Quite convenient, I say, even if a bit of a hack (I'm not suggesting this particular kind of behaviour, of course. Just in case someone gets this wrong, which seems to be happening a lot, recently...). cheers, felix _______________________________________________ Chicken-hackers mailing list Chicken-hackers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-hackers