TIP #339: Case-Insensitive Package Names


TIP:339
Title:Case-Insensitive Package Names
Version:$Revision: 1.8 $
Author:Andreas Kupries <andreask at activestate dot com>
State:Rejected
Type:Project
Tcl-Version:8.6
Vote:Done
Created:Friday, 14 November 2008

Abstract

This document proposes to change the package management facilities of the Tcl core to handle package names in a case-insensitive manner, switching back to case-sensitive operation if and only if explicitly requested by the user. The case of package names is preserved in the storage however.

Rationale

The package management facilities of Tcl are an area where the user of packages is currently burdened with more ... than is convenient or easy. A big problem is that Tcl compares package names case-sensitively. This means that Expect and expect are two different things to Tcl. In the real world however having two packages using the same name but different capitalization is extremely rare.

Yet the user of Tcl package facilities has to remember whatever ecclectic capitalization the package creator has chosen.

Changing this, i.e. having Tcl's package management go to case-insensitive comparison, will lift this burden and make things easier, as it is not necessary anymore to get the capitalization right. Most people will likely simply start to write all package names lower-case after this change.

Specification

Script Level

The only command affected by the proposed change is package. More specifically, its sub-commands ifneeded, present, require, and versions.

In detail

C API

At the C-level the only functions to consider are

The first four of these currently have an integer (boolean) argument exact. This argument is changed to an integer (bitset) flags, with the original exact value residing in bit 0. The strictness of the package name comparison is encoded in bit 1. For easy access to the flags we define

 #define TCL_PKG_EXACT  1  /* Exact version required */
 #define TCL_PKG_STRICT 2  /* Use strict (case-sensitive) package name
                            * comparison */

This change relies on the assumption that all (most) existing users of these functions use the constants 0 and 1 for exact, making them fully backward compatible.

The last function, Tcl_PkgRequireProc, has no arguments we can modify in this manner. Its behaviour is changed to perform case-insensitive searches, as specified above for the associated subcommands of package, and a new function is added for access to the old behaviour, i.e. case-sensitive searches. This new function is

It has the same signature as its pre-TIP counterpart, except that a flags argument is added after the clientData. This argument recognizes TCL_PKG_STRICT as defined above and uses it to switch between case-insensitive and strict search. The old Tcl_PkgRequireProc is reimplemented in terms of Tcl_PkgRequireProcEx.

Unknown handlers

The contract between the package management facilities in the Tcl core and the handler commands registered with package unknown is amended. The handler has to perform case-insensitive search for the package whose name it is invoked with.

Discussions

The contract for the package unknown handler is amended because not doing so would force the package management facilities in the Tcl core to search for a package by iterating over all possible combinations of upper/lower case in the package name. For a name containing N alphabetic characters (i.e. not counting ':'s, and digits) this means to loop 2**N times. This exponentional explosion and consequent running time is not acceptable (The longest name for a package currently found in ActiveState's public TEApot repository is 25 alpabetic characters, forcing over 30 million searches before the core can give up).

Further, of the two known standard package unknown handlers the handler for regular packages need not be modified at all as it always register every possible package it finds. Only the unknown handler for Tcl Modules has to be modified to perform case insensitive filesystem searches, and only for Unix. On Windows the builtin glob command already perform such.

Reference Implementation

An implementation patch is available at SourceForge [1].

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.

Please note that any correspondence to the author concerning this TIP is considered in the public domain unless otherwise specifically requested by the individual(s) authoring said correspondence. This is to allow information about the TIP to be placed in a public forum for discussion.


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