Re: [boost] [filesystem] proposal: treat reparse files as regular files

Subject: Re: [boost] [filesystem] proposal: treat reparse files as regular files
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-08-04 19:27:49

On 5/08/2015 10:14, Niall Douglas wrote:
>> I guess that depends on usage cases -- if it's most common to write code
>> like if (type() == symlink_file) { do something with target(); } then
>> you have a point.  Although code that has sufficient error checking
>> should be able to cope with the idea of a symlink that has an unreadable
>> target.
>>
>> But it seems odd to me to claim that a file is *not* a symlink just
>> because you're told that it's a type of symlink that you don't know how
>> to read.
>
> I'd like to think AFIO's symlinks are "POSIX(-y) symlinks".

That's least-common-denominator thinking.  Which is hard to get away 
from when building a cross-platform abstraction layer, I know, but 
"because it's POSIX" isn't really a good justification either.  There 
are some things that POSIX is very bad at (mostly for historic reasons).

If you have a function that operates on symlinks, then it should operate 
on *all* symlinks, not merely a subset of them.

Like I said though, it's possible the distinction is academic and not 
practical; I don't know if there are any other kinds of surrogates in 
the wild.  So I can understand the reluctance. :)

> Given the Filesystem TS has shipped, I'd say that moment has passed.

Too late to be in the standard (yet), maybe.  But one of the roles of 
Boost is to be better than the standard, so it can be the *next* 
standard. :)