Re: [boost] Re: New design proposal for boost::filesystem

From: Patrick Bennett (patrick.bennett_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-08-22 14:56:24

David Abrahams wrote:

>Carlo Wood <carlo_at_[hidden]> writes:
>  
>
>>I've seen several people already agreeing that there is a design
>>problem with the current boost::filesystem.
>>    
>>
>
>I'm among them.  However, I have a hard time articulating what I found
>difficult about the library, other than that the path portability
>checks seemed to get in my way.  If there's something deeper going on,
>I'd like to hear your opinion of what it is.
>  
>
The fact that boost::filesystem has zero support for 
internationalization kills it for me. 
Ideally, it would just use UTF-8 for everything.  It could fairly easily 
be changed to expect and return UTF-8 strings and then convert 
(Win32...) or pass-through (Linux...) as appropriate based on the platform.
As it is currently written, it can't be used for a Windows application 
that is used in any country which requires a non-Latin character set.  
If I'm writing an application that will be running in Japan or China 
(for e.g.), their file paths and filenames *require* full Unicode 
support.  Boost::filesystem completely ignores this problem so I've 
never been able to use it.  It may have other weaknesses but considering 
it fails right out of the gate for anyone having to write 
internationalized applications, I'd say that's a fairly big problem.

Patrick Bennett