Re: Installation on windows (fwd)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

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On 2005-03-17 15:52:53 +0000 Jeremy Bettis <address@hidden> wrote:


> I have had a handful of problems with path handling, but you are correct, 
> my 
> expressed desire is theoretical rather than pratical.  Primarially because 
> I 
> am willing to make my own changes to gnustep to accomplish my goals. 
> (patches 
> always available at deadbeef.com)  And while I hope that I can eventually 
> merge to an official release of gnustep, that is not my biggest concern. 
> There was a strange bug somewhere, I forget where exactly, where some 
> method 
> was doing something funky with colons, and destroying paths that started 
> with 
> c:\.

I don't believe anything should mess with c:\ except when
importing/exporting a path. Current behavior is essentially that all paths
are held internally as posix/unix paths nad must be converted to/from
windows format when they are imported/exported.

> I believe that minimal path munging is good, because I think that my 
> concept 
> of "user" is different than yours.  My point of view is that the standard 
> user is a rank windows newbie just trying to use a windows application 
> which 
> happens to depend on gnustep.  Your point of view is that the standard user 
> is a unix developer who is porting their gnustep code to windows or 
> something 
> like that.  Clearly I am not inside your head, so this is a guess on my 
> part.

Yep ... you guess absolutely right about my viewpoint ... but I hope I'm
open to other viewpoints too (you just might need to work a bit to make
things clear to me).

So far the comments on this seem fairly evenly divided ...

David and Frederic for posix internal format as at present, Sheldon and you
(at least I think that's your position) would like paths to be held in
native (windows) format internally.  I beleive I'm fairly neutral ... I
started off with a definite preference for the existing code, but after
reading Sheldon's arguments I'm more inclined towards the storage of paths
in native format.

One thing is really clear though ... we need to decide on a rule, stick to
it, and document it MUCH better.

If we want to stay with the current behavior of expecting paths to be held
in posix format internally, we should remove the current code which accepts
a backslash as a path separator on windows, and be rigorous about using only
posix style paths.

If we want to use native format internally, we need to change the base
library to work that way.

In either case, we probably ought to have helper methods to convert between
posix and windows style paths, as it is always going to be necessary for the
application to do that sort of thing occasionally (though we should minimise
it).

We should probably explicitly document policy/behavior for all the cases
Frederic mentioned.

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