Note that where I say "it would be nice to add/change/whatever" something, if you agree I'll be happy to provide sample text.
Would you be willing to either:
a) fork my repo, make the changes, and send a pull request, or
b) make the changes and email me the revision?
That would be very helpful.
In the below, silence gives consent.
I appreciate your cleaning this up. There is no documentation of what changes were made between scsh 0.6.2 and 0.7, so I worked solely from the 0.6.2 documentation, but I did what little experimenting I did using 0.7.
Should the type of *name be specified?
It should probably be mentioned that file names and pathnames are strings, but RnRs already specifies this.
What is gained by allowing override? implementation options other than #t and #f to balance the loss in portability? Scsh has 'query to ask the user which sounds useful, but should a SRFI-170 implementation be required to signal an error if an option is not implemented?
Schemes are always free to extend the domain of arguments to standard procedures; that can be taken for granted, as it is explained in all RnRSes. Generally speaking it "is an error" rather than "an error is signaled" is appropriate language for domain errors; in practice, of course, most Schemes do signal errors in all such cases.
Should the type(s) of perms be specified, and while this increases implementation complexity, should the non-octal symbolic string variety be a required option?
No, I don't think it should be required.
Yes, definitely. I think there was no XSI (which is basically traditional pre-Posix stuff that SUS included) at that time.
Why does temp-file-prefix return /var/tmp/pid if TMPDIR is not set in the environment?
I wasn't really conscious of the difference. I don't know why Olin specified it; maybe /tmp on his system(s) was exceptionally small. Change to /tmp by all means.