On Sunday, 28 July 2013 at 21:09:55 UTC, Lars T. Kyllingstad
wrote:
Currently, std.path.buildPath() is designed so that if one of
the path segments is rooted, then the preceding segments are
simply dropped. That is,
assert(buildPath("foo", "bar", "/baz") == "/baz");
The only reason I wrote it like this is that this was how the
old (now deprecated and removed) join() function was designed,
and buildPath() was supposed to be a drop-in replacement.
I have come to think this design sucks, and I want to fix it.
I cannot think of a single use case for it. I have a new
implementation of this function in the pipeline, so now seems
like a good time. Would anyone be opposed to me rewriting it
so that it throws an exception when any path segment but the
first is rooted?
I use this feature to concatenate path fragments where one of
them might be an absolute path (in which case they override the
previous ones). absolutePath requires that the base path is
absolute, a requirement that buildPath doesn't have.
Personally, I think that the current behavior of buildPath makes
sense. Leading directory separators should not be present in
arguments passed to buildPath unless they indicate an absolute
path.
My recommendation to resolve the problem is to expand and point
out this behavior in the documentation.
