Stefan Seefeld wrote:

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are there any plans to add functions to Boost.Filesystem to get different default directories such as get_user_home_dir(), get_app_config_dir(), get_system_config_dir() et.al.?

On Windows these probably would map directly to the SHGetFolderLocation() function, on *nix based systems these could map to some equivalent environment variable (i.e. $HOME) or some convention (i.e. system config files are in /etc/...). Surely there are some conventions for other systems as well.

While this does indeed sound convenient, I'm afraid other than $HOME there are no such conventions. Or rather, there are too many to choose. I believe for 'system config' and 'application config' at least this belongs into the domain of applications, not system libraries. I wouldn't expect such features in a library such as boost_filesystem.

So let's start with $HOME then. We seem to agree here. And even if there aren't any common conventions for the others it would be nice to have this functionality anyway (we seem to agree on this point as well). For instance, we could simply implement one of the conventions in Boost. For those who like these conventions - fine. Those programmers wanting to use their own directories - fine as well, they just won't use Boost for that task. I find similar functionality to be very important, and - isn't it one of the Boost goals to provide some platform independence? I'ld be happy to implement the Windows versions of these functions as a starting point (given we find a minimal consensus), but would need help for the other platforms. Regards Hartmut