Re: Installation on windows (fwd)

[Jeremy Bettis]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Frith-Macdonald" <address@hidden>
To: "David Ayers" <address@hidden>
Cc: <address@hidden>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: Installation on windows (fwd)


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> On 2005-03-16 15:28:25 +0000 David Ayers <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > The first paragraph was talking about the implicit conversion that 
> > OPENSTEP for NT does.  It would allow things like:
> >
> >    [@"test" writeToFile: @"C:\\Temp/test.txt" atomically: YES];
> >    s = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile: @"C:/Temp\\test.txt"];
> >
> > I don't know whether we currently also support this on cygwin/msys/mingw 
> > but this has lead to real confusion and down right problems with some 
> > versions of OPENSTEP (or WebObjects) that didn't always handle it 
> > correctly.
>
> We don't support it ... but I think the examples you provide would work.
> The reason being ... we expect paths to be in posix format internally and
> convert to windows native format at the point when we do a file operation.
> In both cases, those strings look like relative posix path names 
> containing
> a single separator ...
> so 'C:\Temp/test.txt' would get the '/' converted to '\' and end up as
> 'C:\Temp\test.txt' in the windows native format, and 'C:/Temp\text.txt'
> would similarly end up as 'C:\Temp\text.txt' at the point where it is 
> passed
> to the windows system call to write or read the file.
> However, -lastPathComponent would return 'test.txt' for the first string 
> and
> 'Temp\test.txt' for the second string as these are assumed to be posix
> paths.
> Perhaps OPENSTEP did the same thing?

I can tell you from experience what OPENSTEP did.    Methods like 
writeToFile: didn't touch the filename at all.  Remember windows doesn't 
care which way the slashes go, so fopen("c:\\temp\\text.txt", "r") is 
EXACTLY the same as fopen("c:/temp/text.txt", "r") is EXACTLY the same as 
fopen("c:\\temp/text.txt", "r").  And lastPathComponent would return the 
part of the string after either / or \.

So [@"c:/temp\\text.txt" lastPathComponent] returned @"text.txt" and 
[@"c:\\temp/text.txt" lastPathComponent] returned @"text.txt" also.

And I wish gnustep worked the same way.