Re: [boost] [filesystem] Major changes before standardization

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-11-11 12:41:40

Beman Dawes wrote:
> The critical technical change required is internationalization. The
> plan is to provide a templated basic_path class, with typedefs for
> path and wpath. In other words, an approach very similar to the current
> std::basic_string, std::string, and std::wstring.
>
> Doing this adds a certain amount of complexity compared to the
> current path class. For example, a path_traits class has to be
> introduced to give basic_paths on user defined types a way to import
> the conversions, delimiters, and other traits.

If your basic_path takes a path_traits parameter - which means that you're, 
in fact, misnaming a policy class as 'path_traits' - this is likely to 
create basic_string-ish problems further down the path.

In addition, basic_path on user-defined types simply doesn't make sense (to 
me at least), because the user can't just define his own path class. The set 
of supported paths is determined by the capabilities of the underlying 
filesystem layer. In particular, the user cannot define the conversions 
between the different path types, because they are implementation defined.