Library lookup metadata file
Lassi Kortela 27 May 2020 10:32 UTC
> Personally, I think this is overkill either way. One file per alias is
> simple to implement and simple to use. Anyone can provide an alias for
> anything. Putting multiple aliases into a single file begs the question
> who is maintains that file?
(This design problem is orthogonal to the filename extensions and reader
flags so I started another thread.)
You may be right.
It could make sense to have a more general library-name rewriting and
library-name->filename mapping system (based on matching and rewriting
prefixes and suffixes of names). R6RS library name mapping in particular
is a big mess. Gambit is also doing some interesting stuff with
downloadable modules and URL library names. I don't have a clear idea of
what to do here; more exploration is needed.
All of this kind of stuff may sound really overkill for Chibi, but would
be a boon to Scheme as a whole. Ideally we should come up with something
that works for everyone. A single SCHEME_PATH would be great. Currently
the Akku package manager has to set lots of environment variables for
different Schemes, and packages like chez-srfi have to expose the same
libraries under different filenames due to divergent conventions between
Scheme implementations.