Re: [boost] Design for a file system library

From: Jan Langer (jan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-26 09:03:39

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Vladimir Prus wrote:

>Jan Langer wrote:
>> On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Vladimir Prus wrote:
>> >The first thing is that it would be great to have some base filesystem
>> > class which can be used to access different fs types. This would allow,
>> > for example, accessing regular filesystem and HTTP/WebDAV server in a
>> > uniform manner;
>>
>> it is possible, but not in the sense you mean. for example an
>> implementation for urls can be provided. and you can write
>>   copy ("http://www.boost.org/index.htm", "file:/home/jan/index.htm");
>
>But how that "URL filesystem" would be implemented? Say there will be classes
>for both regular filesystem and http. If they are not derived from any base
>class, you'll have to make url filesystem depend on them by hardcoding
>typenames. How will adding a new scheme be possible then? And what is wrong
>with having a base class?

this is a completly different approach. if you have a class
posix_filesystem you must specify how it shall behave and the user must
check which filesystems are available and which of them he wants to use.

the current approach assumes just _one_ filesystem being available and
this one will be used. how it actually works and which format it uses
for identifiers is impl.defined.

i didn't say that your proposal is wrong :-)

-- 
jan langer ... jan_at_[hidden]
"pi ist genau drei"