On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 02:31:46PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:

Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:

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At 01:53 PM 8/30/2004, Carlo Wood wrote:

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My idea on this was (and still is) that it is possible to convert a relative path to an absolute path (automatically) by adding an absolute path object reference to the relative path object.

Yes, as long as you know the absolute path reference. Is the absolute path reference known for all operating systems? I'm not sure about that. For example, there have been multi-rooted systems that didn't have a concept of "current drive". How would that work? <snip>

Further, I know of one OS that supports directories but not a current directory: Windows CE. All paths passed to its filesystem functions must be absolute.

That would work a lot better with the 'relative_path / native_path' approach: all system calls would be done with absolute paths. boost::filesystem figures out the 'current directory' at application start (if only being the directory that the application itself is in; special code can be added for each supported OS separately if needed). This directory is returned by fs::initial_path (I think it was called). The documentation urges one to use this rather then 'current working directory' and it is the default for fs::complete. For the same reason as stated in the current documentation, I'd urge to use this (already existing) fs::initial_path as completion 'root' when a system call is about to be made for a relative path that is not explicitely tied to a user defined (absolute) native_path object. This means that code like: fs::path p("foo"); if (fs::exists(p)) works on most systems, but fails on Windows CE with the current implementation. You'd need to do explicitely: fs::path p("foo"); if (fs::exists(fs::complete(p))) But this would work on Windows CE just fine: fs::relative_path p("foo"); if (fs::exists(p)) Again prove that it is more robust. -- Carlo Wood <carlo@alinoe.com>