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content/posts/2022-10-30-decentralized-identity-middle-ground.md

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 title = "Decentralized Identity, a Middle Ground"
-date = 2022-10-30
+date = 2022-10-30T03:04:51-05:00
 
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content/posts/2022-10-30-rust-impure-path.md

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+title = "Rust's Impure Path"
+date = 2022-10-30T04:04:51-05:00
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+
+I work on [garbage], a project that touches the filesystem a lot. Because of
+this, I'd really like to control when and where these filesystem accesses
+happen.
+
+[garbage]: https://git.sr.ht/~mzhang/garbage
+
+The Rust standard library has a `fs` module, which I expect to _exclusively_
+contain filesystem access primitives. But actually a lot of the functionality
+also gets leaked into `std::path::Path`.
+
+In my ideal world, `Path` only deals with the data in a path, not its
+interaction with the filesystem. So it should never be able to check whether or
+not a path [exists], for example, or if a path [is a symlink][is_symlink]. Those
+should be delegated to something within `fs`.
+
+[exists]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.exists
+[is_symlink]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.is_symlink
+
+In addition, many of these functions automatically resolve symlinks, without
+built-in ways of achieving the same functionality without resolving symlinks, so
+I ended up having to fill those in myself. For example, I really just expect
+[`canonicalize`] to be an in-memory manipulation of path components.
+
+[`canonicalize`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.canonicalize
+
+Honestly, I've got to give it to Python's [pathlib], which solves the problems I
+noted above. It splits the path API into `Path` and `PurePath`, the latter of
+which does not make any IO accesses. It also provides non-symlink-resolving and
+symlink-resolving variants of converting to absolute paths.
+
+[pathlib]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html