Re: [boost] Re: Shouldn't boost::filesystem be BOOST_POSIX on cygwin?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-08-22 18:54:11

At 05:15 PM 8/22/2004, David Abrahams wrote:
 >Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> writes:
 >
 >>  >Yeah.  But IMO on cygwin boost::filesystem should handle both 
formats.
 >>
 >> It does. The docs were updated after the last release to make that
 >clearer.
 >
 >That's not what I meant.  It should support both formats in a single
 >build, just like most cygwin tools do.

There are two issues; behavior of certain functions and path formats. The 
function behavior (dealing with what is a relative path) has to be selected 
at compile time unless we added runtime option arguments to select 
behavior, and every time we have looked at that it became unworkable. I 
guess we could provide addition functions with different names, but we 
already have quite a number of path decomposition and query functions. I'd 
like to see a compelling use case that the current path member functions 
can't handle.

For formats, we do provide runtime selection. I think "native" already 
provides what is being asked for here.

 >
 >  dave_at_penguin ~
 >  $ ls c:/boost/index.htm
 >  c:/boost/index.htm

That should work.

 >  dave_at_penguin ~
 >  $ ls c:\\boost\\index.htm
 >  c:\boost\index.htm

The double backslashes are not valid at those locations in a Windows native 
path. And yes, I did a test to verify that, using an XP machine. I guess we 
could provide a cygwin extension that allowed them, but my intuition is 
that would be a bad idea. Cygwin may fix the bug in the future.

 >  dave_at_penguin ~
 >  $ ls /cygdrive/c/boost/index.htm
 >  /cygdrive/c/boost/index.htm

Should work, AFAIK.

--Beman