On 07/11/2008, at 4:19 AM, Joseph Wright wrote:

> Will Robertson wrote:
>
>> Taking a look at how \let:NN and friends are implemented strongly
>> tempted my "clean up" urge. Rather than delay it for the "big future
>> refactor" that's going to happen at some stage, I thought it small
>> enough to address immediately.
>
> Is there any public detail about this refactor?  Does it affect using
> expl3 at all?  You've worried me!

I'm afraid at the moment it's just a list of things to attend to...  
and as far as I know it's not public :(

When I started poking around in the expl3 sources you may have noticed  
that a lot of things started changing and, worse, breaking. So that  
quickly stopped and right now I'm (slowly) writing with Frank a suite  
of testfiles so that we can tell when my/our changes don't behave  
properly.

At the same time, we're flagging command names that are undocumented,  
inconsistent, and that have duplicated functionality with other  
commands in other modules. I'm sure you've noticed things like  
\io_put_term and \iow_term, \cs_if_free and \cs_if_exist, etc., that  
should be tidied up a bit.

When the testsuite is finished (still a fair way off), we'll start to  
think about "unifying" the duplicated commands and "fixing" any other  
inconsistent names. In regard to your own expl3-based packages, this  
is one of the reasons that I'm very happy you've got your code hosted  
in version control repositories. (Actually, now that I think of it,  
I've only got keys3 in a repository on my machine. Are xnotes2bib and  
xsiunitx (?) in a public repository as well? Sorry if I've missed that  
along the way.)

I was hoping to include your code into the refactoring process (since  
it will mostly just be a renaming of things) so that when the changes  
are made I can send you patched versions of your packages (or commit  
them directly, as the case may be).

***

So while the scope of the changes will end up affecting a fair spread  
of the expl3 modules, the changes themselves, on a local level, will  
mostly be rather minor. I hope this has allayed your worries a little,  
and not made them worse! :)

Will