Re: Apple changed documentation for -[NSString stringByExpandingTildeInPath]

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2005-05-10 10:01:03 +0100 Sheldon Gill <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Wow ... that's a lot of changes.
>
> That's actually quite well contained, really. There is more of my 
> NSPathUtilities bit and a few more Win32 support routines. {Strings 
> excepted}
>
> I found the new Tiger dirs to be amusing. I had to drop my GSCacheDirectory 
> and GSDesktopDirectory keys...
>
> IsExecutable and show/hide extensions are pretty trivial NSFileManager 
> based 
> on that.
>
> I've also a rev for NSTimeZone which fixes some Win32 strangeness, cleans a 
> little code and provides for more flexible packaging but I thought this was 
> a 
> little outside of this discussion. Again, it needs the Win32 support 
> improvements.
>
> So I was thinking it'd be a reasonably straight-forward commit

I'd still like to see patches little and often ... it's amazing how often 
something that seems simple to its author looks complex to others.  If a 
reviewer has ten minutes free, s/he can probably handle a patch of a few 
lines in a single file ...

> but there is 
> the binary compatibility break we're heading to, which is the right time to 
> do this.

I'm not sure ... Adam is the one to say when we want to make compatibility 
breaks.

> > > * Remove PathHandling mode
> > >
> > > I'm quite concerned about PathHandling mode and want to remove it. I
> > > don't think it's necessary and adds more confusion and complexity.
> >
> > As you know, we had much discussion about path handling, and there was 
> > definitely no consensus ... so the current code is a compromise allowing 
> > the various viewpoints to be more or less satisfied, and switching of 
> > modes 
> > during runtime was purely for testing that.  I think the aim is to move to 
> > the 'do the right thing' mode once people are generally happy (though 
> > perhaps mode control on process startup using an environment variable will 
> > be supported).
>
> In my view there should be one and only one mode. Well defined behaviour 
> that can be relied on.

Each mode can have well defined behavior which can be relied upon ... so 
it's not a disaster if people can't agree on what mode they like.

> The current behaviour of 'do the right thing' doesn't, in my view, do the 
> right thing and gives rise to some quite strange results on win32.

Well,  the behavior is (barring unreported bugs) what all respondents said 
should happen, and I explicitly asked for feedback when I put it in place 
for testing.  As far as I can tell from extensive reading of other 
documentation on path handling, it should also be pretty much expected 
behavior (ie like Perl, TCL and Java documentation says).

What are the specific strange results on win32?  Example/test code would be 
welcome.

> Does this use the current path handling mode semantics?

Yes.