Your initial intuition is right. The intention is to provide some abstraction of the file system/OS. The goal is not to provide a complete abstraction but one that is complete enough to support common operations. If the abstraction is leaking somewhere it's either a bug or there is a good reason why the code doesn't use PAL (for example, the operation is platform/Ruby specific and has no simple abstraction). So if you have a good use-case that doesn't work right now feel free to file a bug here: http://ironruby.codeplex.com/WorkItem/AdvancedList.aspx and we'll fix it.
Tomas From: ironruby-core-boun...@rubyforge.org [mailto:ironruby-core-boun...@rubyforge.org] On Behalf Of Nathan Stults Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 11:19 PM To: ironruby-core@rubyforge.org Subject: [Ironruby-core] PlatformAdaptationLayer - scope What is the correct way to view the PlatformAdaptationLayer? My initial assumption was that it was IronRuby's abstraction of the file system (and environment variables), but in digging deeper I see that the Dir builtin is calling into the file system in many places using the System.IO classes directly. My next thought was that the PAL must then be purely a hosting construct that exists to allow hosts to provide alternative dependency resolution, but this doesn't seem to quite fit either, since the Glob implementation, which is also a part of Dir.cs, *does* go through the PAL, so it isn't just used for dependency resolution. Is the long term plan to make all file system manipulation go through the PAL, and if not, could someone shed some light on how the PAL is intended to be used / understood? I'm attempting to do something similar to the ZipArchive stuff in Chiron, that would allow zip files to be put into the application path of non-silverlight apps, or used for the Gem_Path, etc (for easy deployment of IronRuby, gems and other static library code) but I'm concerned that if a gem or some other ruby code tries to scan the file system for convention based dependencies (does this even happen?) the PAL may get bypassed entirely under certain circumstances. I'm not familiar enough with the ruby libraries to know if this should even be a concern in practice, but the zip-as-virtual-file-system metaphor looks like it will have some holes at least in theory. Thanks, Nathan
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