Pre-3.6 code freeze

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 4:33 PM, NotFound <julian.notfound at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello
>
>> It seems we have a much greater variance in the files which are failing in
>> different smoke reports on Windows than we get in any other OS.  Do you have
>> any ideas as to what enabled us to get a PASS on this box as distinct from
>> other Windows boxes?
>
> The problems I've seen in my XP Home box are:
>
> - Creating hard links: don't know it it can't in general, or because
> of having a FAT filesystem. Anyway, the system can't create it, is not
> parrot fault.
>
> - File with a bizarre name: the problem is that the filename created
> is not the same as seen by parrot. It may be related to the charset of
> the windows console, the way perl handle it, or both. Also, maybe
> being in a FAT filesystem gives a different result than if it was
> NTFS. Not a parot fault. A possible solution is to create the file
> from parrot, not from perl.
>
> - A failure in socket: no idea about that.

We should create a ticket to keep track of these issues. I'm thinking
that we probably don't want to be including features in Parrot core
which are not supported on all our target systems. First question is,
of course, what is our current list of target systems? That's a list
that we should be more proactive in defining, and more conscientious
about maintaining. It may very well be that we no longer consider
Windows XP to be a "supported platform". Microsoft no longer supports
it, and without a platform champion maybe we don't want to either.

Things like making hardlinks, or filenames with strange encoding
shouldn't be in Parrot core if they aren't available on all our target
platforms. It's trivial for us to move that kind of functionality out
into extension libraries or other places so people who want it can
access it. Also, with the ability to get NCI access to the necessary
underlying functions, maybe we don't need a built-in ability at all:
Write up an example for how to do it with NCI and rip out the code
from OS PMC and elsewhere.

--Andrew Whitworth