Re: [boost] Filesystem Library mini-review

[Beman Dawes]

At 02:35 PM 1/5/2003, Sean Parent wrote:

>on 1/5/03 10:21 AM, Beman Dawes at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> I had a conversation with Bill Plauger, Howard Hinnant, and several other
>> library implementors at the last C++ committee meeting, and we agreed on
>> a possible approach to the conversion problem. Conversions between wide
>> and narrow names has always been the hold up. No one has been willing to
>> step forward and say "Of all the possible ways to do the conversion, here
>> is how libraries should do it."
>
>Rather than using simple path specifier (which I think are a very limited
>way to refer to a local resource) - why not make the path syntax be URI
>based? There is already a W3C proposal for extending URIs to be fully
>international friendly (IRIs) -
><http://www.w3.org/International/iri-edit/>.
>This would also allow for relative references, remote references,
>authentication, versioned file systems (such as WebDAV
><http://www.webdav.org/>), and query references to database file systems.
>
>I would rather see going with an existing standard than inventing yet
>another way to refer to resources with international names.

Sean,

I think you may have misunderstood the context, although internationalization issues are confusing enough that I may be the confused one. Here is my understanding of the problem.

The syntax, semantics, and about everything else about paths that operating system functions traffic in was defined years ago for each operating system, standardized or not. Those native path formats aren't something we can change.

Likewise, higher-level generic path formats have been nailed down for years by POSIX, RFC2396, etc. That's why the Filesystem Library's Generic Path Grammar was chosen as a subset of those standards.

For boost::filesystem::path, any other path handling facility, the need arises to convert a path between narrow and wide character strings. For example, the operating system may use narrow character paths but the program traffics in wstrings. That causes a need for conversions, and if I understand correctly, there are a number of ways (all conforming to one standard or another) to do that conversion, and it is really messy because of locale issues. PJP is well aware of those standards; indeed he wrote some of them, and IIRC has been to Japan and other Asian countries more than twenty times dealing with internationalization issues.

So the problem isn't to "invent yet another way to refer to resources with international names". Rather, it is a need to be able to convert to between existing ways to reference resources with international names.

--Beman


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