buildPath() and absolute paths

[Vladimir Panteleev]

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.