Re: [boost] Re: boost::filesystem file restrictions

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-08-14 19:49:06

At 03:28 PM 8/14/2003, David Abrahams wrote:

 >"Peter Dimov" <pdimov_at_[hidden]> writes:
 >
 >> I am not sure that it should be the responsibility of the path class to
 >> enforce some notion of portability. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to
 >> defer the portability check, if any, to the point where the path is
 >> actually used in a filesystem operation?
 >
 >I agree.  Having portability enforcement can be useful, but AFAICT the
 >way it's currently supplied is biased for the 1% case. There's an
 >enormous class of applications which gets paths from the user or one
 >part of the platform implementation (e.g. a file selection dialog),
 >possibly does some manipulation on the path, and uses it to open some
 >local files on the platform.

Yes, of course. There is no check performed in those cases. The only names 
checked are on those portions of a path created via the generic grammar 
constructors. The check does not apply to the native constructors.

 >  The only category of application which
 >needs enforced path portability, AFAICT, is the one which stores paths
 >in some file meant to be used on other platforms, or arguably those
 >which encode paths directly in portable code.  These applications are
 >comparitively rare IME.

Only those cases are checked, so if they are rare in your code, then you 
won't experience a problem. Let me know if you run into any cases where 
name checking gets applied to a native path; that shouldn't be happening.

--Beman