[boost] Name checking in filesystem

From: Walter Landry (wlandry_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-09-26 22:25:40

Greetings,

I have come across an annoying problem with the filesystem library.  I
have wrapped filesystem with Swig so that I can call it from python.
I had to rewrite the filesystem::path implementation a little because
Swig can't handle nested classes.  In any case, once I got that sorted
out, I wanted to do something like

  p=path(".bar")

which doesn't work because filenames starting with a period are not
allowed by the default name checking routine.  Argh.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to change the default name
checker from python.  If I worked at it long enough, I could probably
work it out.  But I am sure that I don't want to have to run something
like path.default_name_check(no_check) at the beginning of every 10
line script.  It is a particular piece of functionality (name
checking) that just gets in the way.  I would wager that most people
using boost::filesystem from scripts would not want to have to deal
with it, since it is completely different from every other portable,
cross platform filesystem API.

So to make a long story short, I think the default for
boost::filesystem should be not to check for "portable" paths.  This
is different from a position I took earlier, where I thought that it
is ok if I only have to set it once at the beginning.  That is
acceptable for large programs, but not for small ones.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry_at_[hidden]