phobo's std.file is completely broke!

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 7:28:43 PM MDT Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 09/15/2018 08:14 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > The issue was reported in bugzilla quite some time ago.
> >
> > https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8967
> >
> > However, while Walter's response on it basically indicates that we
> > should
> > just close it as "won't fix," we never actually did
>
> It's worth noting that the discussion made it very clear that Walter's
> viewpoint on the matter was based on his own misunderstanding (ie,
> mistakenly failed to notice that `\\?\` != `\\.\`) He never actually
> made any comment after that was pointed out.

If a clean, simple solution can be found that allows long paths on Windows
to work seemlessly without subtle side effects, then I don't see why it
can't be implemented, but it needs to be something that's not going to cause
problems. Otherwise, it needs to be left up to the caller to do whatever
happens to be correct for their particular circumstances. We want Phobos to
work seemlessly across platforms where reasonably possible, but
unfortunately, it's not always reasonable. Either way, Microsoft has clearly
made a mess of this. So, I don't know how reasonable it is to work around
it. Regardless, we either need to figure out a sane way to work around the
problem (without causing new problems in the process) or document it so that
the situation is clear.

- Jonathan M Davis