
A few months ago I started to write my first multi-platform application. In the hope to be shielded from all kinds of filesystem specific issues, I started to use boost - also for the first time - mainly because of of boost::filesystem. However - I have found that it doesn't shield me from a LOT of filesystem specific things. In the meantime I was in the need of writing six additional functions that are filesystem specific: std::string native_file_string(fs::path const&); void copy_file(fs::path const& source_file, fs::path const& target_file); void chmod(fs::path const& filename, bool readonly); bool is_readonly(fs::path const& filename); void rename_file(fs::path const& source_file, fs::path const& target_file); size_t get_file_size(fs::path const& filename); Today I ran into a very serious problem. Hopefully it is just me who is making a stupid mistake (however unlikely that may sound ;) but it sure seems like a huge bug in boost::filesystem of a magnitude that not only amazes me but will also force me to stop using boost::filesystem if this is true. The reason that I didn't find this problem earlier in the pasts months is because so far I've done all development on GNU/Linux - and only recently have started to actually try and get things to work on cygwin. The reason I subscribed to this list is in the hope to find Beman here, is he reading this list? My hope is to start a public discussion about boost::filesystem - problems, improvements, missing features etc. I will sent a separate mail for the 'serious bug' that I just mentioned, because it isn't 100% sure yet that this is actually a bug ;). -- Carlo Wood <carlo@alinoe.com>