[Starkit] auto_execok and Starpacks

[Joey Mukherjee]

On Aug 8, 2005, at 4:53 PM, Jeff Hobbs wrote:

> Joey Mukherjee wrote:
>> Ok, I am just now getting back to this.  This being the problem of a
>> starpack seeing itself as a directory, not a file.
>>
>> Anyway, is this a bug? Will it be fixed? Is there an easy work around?
>>
>> One of my programs likes to do things to itself and other programs in
>> that directory and now it just ignores itself.  Is there a way to get
>> the name of the program being run?  Maybe I can work around
>> it in code?
>
> It's hard to argue whether this is by design or a bug, because
> you can come up with good arguments either way.  I might be
> inclined to say bug, in that the 'auto_execok' proc was never
> updated to handle the VFS case.  The argument for design is
> that, well, you are a directory in the "Tcl" sense, and if you
> are looking for yourself and in a starpack, 'info nameofexe'
> suffices.  Kind of weak, but a solution is even harder, as if
> we consider the base case, what about other executables that
> might be in a starpack?  How do we really know whether to
> consider them an exe or not?  Do we allow for just the main
> starpack?  But what if it's just a kit and not a pack?  Once
> mounted, you can't really be sure.


It seems as if none of the file or glob commands work on the file 
either.   This is a little bit more onerous for me anyway.  The 
auto_execok was easy enough to work around, but do all the file and 
glob commands also have to be dysfunctional on the starpack?  Even if 
the starpack was totally read only, I wish it would show up as a file 
so things like "file mtime" would work.

Cheers,
Joey