[boost] [Filesystem] behaviour of branch_path

From: Gustavo Guerra (gmcg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-01-25 22:48:45

I tried to search for this on the list archives but didn't find anything, so 
forgive me if it was already discussed.

Why does branch_path return path("") with simple paths like "file.ext"? 
Would'nt it make more sense to return path(".")? At least that was I was 
expecting. I had to go carefully see at documentation to discover it wasn't 
like that, because in other place in the docs its writen "A non-empty path 
is specified as a precondition because an empty path is almost certainly an 
error".
This way, for example, if I have some code that gets the parent directory of 
a path and then uses that in other path operations, I'm forced to make 
special cases checking for has_branch_path, when if it returned "." it would 
work better for most cases. Was this discussed and there is a reason for 
this? Can someone point me to it? I think this falls on the same category as 
not throwing an exception on remove.

Regards
Gustavo Guerra