[GRASS-dev] Windows-style Pathnames

[Paul D Kelly]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Glynn Clements wrote:

> Windows isn't Unix. There will inevitably need to be some handling of
> platform-specific behaviour.
>
> However, it's far better to create a set of functions to handle such
> issues than to deal with individual files separately.

Yes I agree with that; I think that's what I was trying to say but hadn't
thought it through. E.g. a G_mkdir() to abstract the fact that Unix and
Windows mkdir() require a different number of arguments, that kind of
thing.


On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Huidae Cho wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 09:25:22PM +0000, Glynn Clements wrote:
>>
>>> -#ifdef __MINGW32__
>>> -       sprintf ( buf, "%s\\%s\\VAR", G_location_path(), G_mapset() );
>>> -#else
>>>          sprintf ( buf, "%s/%s/VAR", G_location_path(), G_mapset() );
>>> -#endif
>>
>> This is arguably correct, although possbily better formulated as e.g.:
>>
>> 	sprintf ( buf, "%s" DIRSEP "%s" DIRSEP "VAR", G_location_path(), G_mapset() );
>> or:
>> 	sprintf ( buf, "%s%s%s%sVAR", G_location_path(), DIRSEP, G_mapset(), DIRSEP );
>>
>> rather than using a platform test.
>>
>> However, using / should work as an argument to fopen(). The issue is
>> more significant if paths are constructed and stored for later use
>> (e.g. in $GISRC). In that situation, we need to decide whether to:
>>
>> 1. create and store the pathname in the host's syntax, or
>> 2. store it in Unix syntax and convert it as required.
>
> The above code actually does #2 under the wrong assumption that GISDBASE
> is in an MSys installation directory.

When we are talking about host syntax or Unix syntax, do we mean only the 
difference between / and \ for directory separators in pathnames?

I mean c:\grass\grassdata format is more correct, although as Glynn said 
c:/grass/grassdata works in a lot of circumstances and means very little 
in GRASS has to be changed (there are lots of C routines that form 
pathnames by concatenating strings with /). /c/grass/grassdata is 
Msys-specific and is specially interpreted by the Msys shell, right? I 
don't think there should be a need to use that format at all (except see 
Huidae's comment below).

>> Either option will involve a lot of changes. #1 is easier to
>> implement, but will probably need to be done in more places (it needs
>> to be done for every pathname which might need to be in host syntax at
>> some point). #2 is harder, but only needs to be performed in places
>> where host syntax is known to be necessary.
>
> I found #2 a better choice becase MSys shell scripts will be happier
> with posix path.

Using the form c:/grass/grassdata rather than /c/grass/grassdata has 
proven OK for me so far (mostly in the configure script and bits of shell 
scripting done in the installation process and Makefiles). Were there many 
examples where this format was problematic?

Paul