Reduce dependency on system commands

[robsimmons]

magenbluten writes in comments to #15

as i already mentioned "rm -Rf" doesn't work on windows systems. aditionally the "FSUtil.systemLines" uses "someprog > somefile" for capturing and parsing program output. this of course does also not work on windows systems and should be fixed. i think of writing a "shell-monad" similar to "hsh (haskell shell)" for similar tasks.

rm -Rf is indeed one of the couple of things that necessitate running smackage within the cygwin environment in Windows, and it would be better to create a SML-level facility for crawling the directories, deleting stuff and then deleting the directories.

I believe our testing was that pipe-to-file works in the Windows cmd shell - can we get a confirmation that pipe-to-file does not work using OS.Process.system in Windows XP/Vista/7? I was under the impression that it did.

If that doesn't work, I don't know of a good alternative, since "fork" only exists in Posix.

[gian]

Isn't there a windows recursive delete command? Isn't it called 'deltree' or somesuch?

[robsimmons]

True enough, Windows usually has its own commands to do stuff, they're just different.

Since we already have a separate compilation path for Windows, I wouldn't be sad about having an "fsutil-windows.sml" that duplicated "fsutil.sml". Fundamentally, though, I'm going to think of cygwin support as good enough unless we get someone who is interested in poking around and testing things in Windows.

[gian]

I heartily agree at this point. Non-cygwin windows support would be lovely and all that, but I'm not sure it's high priority just yet.