Stewart, Robert wrote:
I have no experience with Macs, so I don't know how such data is managed on that platform, but I suspect it will be different in non-trivial ways from Windows and *nix.
Windows/Mac is my particular use case that spawned this thread. Mac(OSX) has the POSIX HOME environment variable defined to the directory /Users/<name> which is directly exposed in Finder with a house icon under the PLACES group. Home contains Applications, Desktop and Documents directories, among others. These appear to be stable location Win has the USERPROFILE (a composition of HOMEDRIVE, HOMEPATH) environment variable defined to the directory(at least on standard install of XP and Vista) C:\Documents and Settings\<name> which is *not* directly exposed in Explorer. Userprofile contains Desktop, My Documents directories, among others. There has been discussion concerning roaming issues. In both of these OS's there are no environment variables exposing Desktop or My Documents. Also the exact text is a function of the localization in effect. Both OS's do provide api's to access these paths accounting for localization. It appears based on this thread that *NIX's other than OSX do not have these concepts at all, other than maybe the concept of HOME which appears to be contentious in this thread as well. Is there room in boost for documents_directory_path, and desktop_directory_path, that return proper paths for (lack of a better categorization)GUI OS's? Jeff