Re: [boost] Name checking in filesystem

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-09-29 09:05:16

At 11:25 PM 9/26/2004, Walter Landry wrote:
 >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.

Peter Dimov and others have also argued that the default is wrong, and I'm 
sympathetic to their arguments. Some people may believe the default should 
be "native" rather "no_check".

Either of those would be breaking changes for some current programs which 
use the library, and we would have to figure a way to deal with that.

--Beman