On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Marcos Caceres <marc...@opera.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Dan Brickley <dan...@danbri.org> 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.
>>
>
> I spoke to Dan about the above offline, we feel that adding the
> following non-normative authoring guideline into the specification
> would be sufficient to address Dan's concerns:

Just a quick note to confirm that this would satisfy my concern for
now. I hope a subdirectory based approach can be specified in the
future, but for now I'm happy with this resolution.

Also to ack Art's response which arrived as I type this.

Thanks both. May 2010 not be like 1984 :)

cheers,

Dan

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