Crystal: Suggestion: A way to require relative to the working directory

[paulcsmith]

I made a library that does this, but it's slow and a bit overkill for something so simple: https://github.com/paulcsmith/require_helpers.cr

My thought process is that using relative paths work great when things are int he same folder, but if you need to go up a few folders it can get confusing quickly. You have to count how many folders to go back, and it makes moving files a pain because you need to update the require paths. Instead we could have a require_wd that requires a file with the working directory as the root.

require_wd "spec/spec_helper"

# Rather than, which is harder to read, write and change
require "../../../spec_helper" 

We could also add shortcuts for require_src and require_spec, but maybe that's overkill for the standard lib. Thoughts?

[paulcsmith]

I just opened a number of suggestion issues. I like getting suggestions for my projects as issues, but if there is a better place for me to put these, LMK and I'll happily move them!

[paulcsmith]

And maybe the naming isn't good, but I think being able to require from the project root would be really helpful

[RX14]

Adding more names for require is ugly I think. If anything, you could add a special symbol to mean the src dir, for example require "@/controllers/foo" instead of require "../src/controllers/foo" in specs. This is used in vbuild in JS-land, and I find it pretty useful.

[paulcsmith]

Yeah I don't really love the idea of different requires, but some way to require from the working directory would be incredible. I like the @ sign idea a lot actually

[bew]

but then, for a require "@/hello" in a file located at /lib/my_lib/src/just_require_hello.cr, the required file should be looked at /lib/my_lib/src/ ?

[RX14]

@bew yes, for libraries @ would have to refer to the library's src.

I'm not really seriously suggesting my idea be implemented, just that if the problem that OP's library solves becomes a major pain point, I would use @ instead of multiple requires.

[ozra]

How about require "/my/thing"

I can't imagine anyone _ever_ wanting to require a file using absolute path; so / would be reasonable to signify _project root_.

Otherwise //my/thing. Or so.

[refi64]

FWIW using double slashes is what Bazel and family do to reference project root.

[dmitryrck]

I really like the way it is now: simple :tada:

[drosehn]

I have no opinion on whether this is worth doing, but I'll note that svn uses ^ for the root level of a repository. eg:
Relative URL: ^/trunk/myStuff

I haven't worked with Bazel, but in some sysadmin contexts I've seen scripts create filenames which have two slashes in a row (even though they didn't intend to), but the script works fine because unix treats multiple consecutive slashes the same as a single slash.

[asterite]

Just do require "../../some_file.cr". Let's not add more and more features and special cases because of programmer laziness.

[paulcsmith]

@asterite Thanks for reviewing. I think keeping features and special cases to a minimum is a great goal.