On May 25, 2009, at 1:28 PM, Ramana Kumar wrote:
And yes, it definitely
should not be "on" by default. The user has to explicitly
enable it somehow.
I think that is unjustified...
I think both positions can be justified.
but only because I can't think of the drawbacks to auto caching.
(Why isn't disabling it what you have to do explicitly?)
For one thing, I don't think ikarus (or any software really) should
be writing stuff to your file system without you explicitly giving
permission (not to mention making network connections and calling
home base every time you start up, or auto downloading of updates,
etc. which I think are pure evil).
Now maybe we can make an exception to the cache directory on the
same ground that, say, a browser auto caches web content. Which
takes us to the second thing ...
Depending on what you do, this cache directory can grow to be very
big (this is a problem with auto caching itself regardless of if
it's enabled by user request or by default). For example, I get
many libraries for testing purposes, and if every time I use one
such library, it gets compiled and cached indefinitely, I *think*
that would be a serious problem.
This is to say, convince me of otherwise please. :-)
Aziz,,,
