Jason House wrote: > Vladimir Prus wrote: > > Does those "alternate streams" belong to filesystem library at all? > > For one thing, the ':' symbols is not allowed anywhere except for root > > name. For another thing, on all systems but NTFS, "bar.baz.blip:blat" > > would be considered as having "blip:blat" extension, and making the > > function behave differently on NTFS is confusing. Lastly, the 'extension' > > function is supposed to do only syntax transformation, but to tell if > > you're on Fat32 or NFTS you'd need to ask operating system... > > > > - Volodya > > From the library standpoint, I would have to imagine that there should > be some kind of support for appending :blat... > > In fact, you can even add a stream to a directory! c:\:hiddenfile.txt
It's hard to portably support unportable extension ;-) In fact, a seemingly simple issue of finding file attributes (size, for example), is still not finally solved. > Without any real usage information, I find it hard to say what the > extrension truly is. Maybe blip:blat really would be appropriate. In > most cases it would make the file extension unrecognized through code > unaware of :blat... But it does make me wonder if there is some way to > make such a case more obvious to the application programmer... The only > file usage example I've seen actually did stuff like good.txt:bad.txt > ... the used a new file extension in the stream name! At the very > least, this might break the "last period" rule for file extension... Alas, I can't add more to this discussion. I don't know a bit about how alternate streams are used, and don't have the time to find out. I think that basic, syntantic "extension" and "change_extension" are quite usefull anyway. Beman, if that's fine with you, I'll code them. - Volodya _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
