[boost] Re: [filesystem] new functions proposals

From: Jason House (jhouse_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-04-21 07:32:00

Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Does those "alternate streams" belong to filesystem library at all?
> For one thing, the ':' symbols is not allowed anywhere except for root name.
> For another thing, on all systems but NTFS, "bar.baz.blip:blat" would be
> considered as having "blip:blat" extension, and making the function behave
> differently on NTFS is confusing. Lastly, the 'extension' function is
> supposed to do only syntax transformation, but to tell if you're on Fat32
> or NFTS you'd need to ask operating system...
> 
> - Volodya

>From the library standpoint, I would have to imagine that there should
be some kind of support for appending :blat...

In fact, you can even add a stream to a directory! c:\:hiddenfile.txt

Without any real usage information, I find it hard to say what the
extrension truly is.  Maybe blip:blat really would be appropriate.  In
most cases it would make the file extension unrecognized through code
unaware of :blat...  But it does make me wonder if there is some way to
make such a case more obvious to the application programmer...  The only
file usage example I've seen actually did stuff like good.txt:bad.txt
... the used a new file extension in the stream name!  At the very
least, this might break the "last period" rule for file extension...