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Path Handling and running under windows


From: Richard Frith-Macdonald
Subject: Path Handling and running under windows
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 13:42:26 +0000

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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.
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