Re: [boost] boost/filesystem/directory.hpp attached for comment

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-03-21 13:09:29

At 03:01 AM 3/21/2002, Dylan Nicholson wrote:

 > --- Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
 >>
 >> I understand each of your points above; indeed my first cut looked a 
lot
 >> like what you are describing. Here is why the header evolved:
 >>
 >I do accept and see some benefit in the method you've chosen, but the
 >"arbritrariness" of the names I guess is what worries me the most.  It's
 >much harder to think up long descriptive names that accurately capture 
the
 >intent. create_missing_directories probably stands out for that
 >reason - what missing directories? And does it fail if there are
 >no directories to create? etc.

I'm not so worried with create_directory/create_missing_directories as 
remove/prune and copy.

Two names I can live with.

But with remove/prune, there end up being something like 7 names, and many 
of those have several overloads.  Minimum 13 signatures in all, and that 
doesn't even cover a few of the behavior corner cases.

An alternative would be to have a single name ("remove") with four 
signatures (unfiltered, filtered by name, filtered by regex, filtered by 
Predicate).  All would take an options argument, which would be a bitmask 
type (17.3.2.1.2) with the following entries (I haven't tried to pick names 
yet):

    *  OK if !exist(path) [otherwise throw if !exist(path)]
    *  recurse into subdirectories [otherwise don't recurse]
    *  error if !is_directory(path), or,
       error if !is_file(path),
       [otherwise can be either file or directory]
    *  remove path itself if filter results in is_empty_directory(path)
       [otherwise filtered functions on dirs apply to contests only]

Dropping from 7 names to 1, and 13 signatures to 4 is certainly attractive.

Food for thought.

--Beman