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

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-11-12 20:19:01

At 06:50 PM 11/12/2004, Peter Dimov wrote:

 >Beman Dawes wrote:
 >> At 02:26 PM 11/12/2004, Peter Dimov wrote:
 >>> We have two OSes in use today. Windows, which takes either path or
 >>> wpath, and POSIX et al, which takes only a path. If the user wants to
 >>> use something that is neither a path or a wpath, he must convert it
 >>> to one of those.
 >>
 >> Yes. Or more exactly, to "native_path_string_type" which is an
 >> implementation defined typedef, AFAWK, always to std:string or
 >> std::wstring.
 >
 >I'm not sure that this is the right way to handle "dual" OSes, such as
 >Windows NT. On Windows NT both string types are "native" from the API 
point
 >of view. The library should not attempt to convert the path supplied from 

 >the user! This may or may not produce the desired results. The OS must be 

 >trusted to do the necessary conversion (it knows whether the filesystem 
on
 >which the path resides stores narrow or wide names, and how to convert
 >between them in this particular context).

It might be messy to make the single path class approach work if Windows is 
viewed as a dual rather than wide O/S.

   path p;
   p /= "foo";
   if ( some_bool ) p /= L"kühl";

   if ( exists( p ) ) ... // use wide or narrow API depending on some_bool

I guess path objects could keep track of whether or not they had ever been 
modified by an argument other than a char string, and use the Windows wide 
API. Seems messy...

--Beman