Re: [MacPerl-Porters] default type/creator

At 14:26 +0100 2001.10.30, Axel Rose wrote:
>The issue I would like to see changed is the default of TEXT/MPS .
>Ideal is a default setting in MacPerl. But as nobody is going to
>extend the application itself a rather easy choice would be to
>just save as "BINA/????".
>
>That way if you double click such a file Finder will ask the user
>what to do. If the file is TEXT users might get very confused
>of very long lines, error messages from SimpleText or cryptic
>characters when a text editor opens the download. The programmer
>is more or less forced to think about setting type/creator.

That's how it has always been, and it's never posed a significant problem.
I am not going to change it now, unless there is really strong support for
it from the MacPerl users, and I am convinced it is the right thing to do.
Right now, neither condition is satisfied.  :-)  I think text is usually
the right thing, as most users create text files.  I think it is *good*
that you should be forced to think about type/creator.

I just had an idle thought that we could add a BINA/McPL type with its own
special icon, and that MacPerl would not open these files, and that it
would automatically change TEXT/McPL files to BINA/McPL files if they were
opened for O_WRONLY|O_CREAT and you used binmode() on it ... but I don't
think so.

For now, I will be satisfied with someone getting the GU…I resource to work
again, and if someone wants to add a preference to MacPerl to change that
preference, I would gladly accept the patch.  Then you can have BINA/????
if that is what you want.  But as for me, I would rather have all my files
created with TEXT/R*ch ...

As to Bart's comments, I think a Net::FTP::Mac wouldn't be a bad idea.  I
don't think it would be great to automatically switch to it, necessarily,
at least not without an easy way for the user to opt out of it, because I
might decide that everything should be transferred as binary, and I don't
want to have to call $ftp->binary before every file etc.  So my vote would
be for a Net::FTP::Mac which has to be called explicitly, or a way to pass
an argument to the Net::FTP->new constructor to specify NOT using
Net::FTP::Mac (or any platform-specific extensions).  You get the idea.

Certainly, it is something to take up with Graham, if he has the time to
discuss it, since he has probably talked to others about it for Windows ...

-- 
Chris Nandor                      [email protected]    http://pudge.net/
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