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As the 'Re: Installation on windows (fwd)' thread seemed played out (apparently those who wished to comment had done so), I went off list for some more opinions and came up with a path forwards ... so we can produce a clear policy on path handling to be in polace by the time serious numbers of people start developing applications for windows (something I expect to see happen quite quickly now that we have some coimittment to polish the gui to a usable state).
The initial stage is to aim to support both unix and windows paths. Thanks to Wim in particular for suggesting supporting both formats at once and pushing one of my buttons by suggesting that we 'do the right thing' ... (NeXTstep developers made that a mantra).
It is of course impossible to do everything right for both styles of path, so I've added a single NSString method to set the path handling mode in case anyone needs strict unix or strict windows path handling, but the default is to try to do the right thing and handle paths in the best way we can.
Most path handling methods have been pretty completely rewritten and shoul behave in a reasonable way for both styles of path. I have checked a lot of the behavior against current MacOS-X behavior and made the GNUstep implementation compatible with MacOS-X except where it necessarily differs in order to support windows paths. I have documented all these methods, with examples, and have tried to make sure that the regression test suite now checks all the documented behaviors.
Of course, with such a large rewrite, the possibility of bugs having crept in is pretty high ... so I'd appreciate testing.
Now ... supporting the use of windows paths internally is only a first stage ... However, it does mean that people should be able to enter paths into the system in the way that is most natural to them, and we don't need to perform path translation on input.
Output is a different matter ... I beleive that the cygwin and msys shells may supply us with unix style paths (their own mangled representations of windows paths). I don't have a clear idea of what the circumstances are under which they supply us each sort of path ... this needs to be clearly understood. Perhaps we can just unmangle those strings at the point where we pass them to system calls, or perhaps we can just figure out how to avoid them passing mangled strings in arguments/environment. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using the GPG bundle for GNUMail
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