A quick thought here. I spent several hours today trying to figure out why a simple Firefox toolkit application wouldn’t work. (I don’t know what to call “-app application.ini” applications anymore, as “XULRunner” has definitely fallen from favor…) It took me far too long to realize that the “default” subdirectory should’ve been named “defaults” – something that I already know about these apps, but I only build them from scratch every two years or so…
Catching this sort of rookie mistake is, fundamentally, an argument validation exercise: the main difference is instead of the argument being an object of some kind, it’s a directory on the filesystem. If Mozilla has a module or component for validating a directory’s structure in general, I haven’t heard of it…
Which is the point of my post here. I’m wondering what general-purpose libraries exist for validating a directory tree’s structure and contents at a basic level. Somebody out there must have run into this problem before and created libraries for this. I’d love to see libraries written in C++, D, Python, NodeJS and/or privileged JavaScript. Please reply to my post if you can point me to them. (For once, a quick search on the world’s most popular search engine fails me…) Bonus points for libraries that allow passing in callbacks for file-specific validation. (“Is there a syntactically correct .ini file at (root)/application.ini?”)