Boost Filesystem Do List
24 June 2010

Beta 1 comments

The descriptions for portable_name() and portable_directory_name()
appear to be at odds.

portable_name() : ... && (name is "." or "..", and the first character
not a period or hyphen)

portable_directory_name(): ... && (name is "." or ".."  or contains no periods)

Should portable_name() be "... && (name is "." or "..", or contains no
periods) && (first character not a hyphen)"?  Maybe I'm missing
something?
- uncomplete(p, base)

My pet request.  It may be useful to simplify other functions as well,
since there's no current way to go from an absolute path to a relative
one, meaning that most functions need to handle relative ones even
when that might not be natural.  With this functionality,
preconditions requiring absolute paths would be less onerous.

   Precondition: p.is_absolute() && base.is_absolute()

   Effects: Extracts a path, rp, from p relative to base such that
canonical(p) == complete(rp, base).  Any ".." path elements in rp form
a prefix.

   Returns: The extracted path.

   Postconditions: For the returned path, rp, rp.is_relative() ==
(p.root_name() == b.root_name()).

[Notes: This function simplifies paths by omitting context.  It is
particularly useful for serializing paths such that it can be usefully
moved between hosts where the context may be different, such as inside
source control trees.  It can also be helpful for display to users,
such as in shells where paths are often shown relative to $HOME.

In the presence of symlinks, the result of this function may differ
between implementations, as some may expand symlinks that others may
not.  The simplest implementation uses canonical to expand both p and
base, then removes the common prefix and prepends the requisite ".."
elements.  Smarter implementations will avoid expanding symlinks
unnecessarily.  No implementation is expected to discover new symlinks
to return paths with fewer elements.]

Docs

Code

All

Class path

Operations

Miscellaneous


© Copyright Beman Dawes, 2010

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. See www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt