phobo's std.file is completely broke!

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 09/22/2018 04:46 PM, Jonathan Marler wrote:
> 
> Decided to play around with this for a bit.  Made a "proof of concept" 
> library:
> 
> https://github.com/marler8997/longfiles
> 
> It's just a prototype/exploration on the topic.  It allows you to 
> include "stdx.longfiles" instead of "std.file" which will enable the 
> conversion in every call, or you can import "stdx.longfiles : 
> toLongPath" and use that on filenames passed to std.file.

Cool! Will have to take a closer look and try it out.

Regarding this: "TODO: what should be done about the MS-DOS FAT 
filesystem?"...

First of all, FAT16 can still be fully-used with the current interfaces 
anyway - it's just that if you attempt anything FAT16 doesn't support, 
the error you get will come from the OS rather than a D lib. But 
*unlike* the non-`\\?\` path issues, there really isn't anything here 
that needs to be worked around, or that even *can* be sensibly worked 
around.

Besides, FAT16 is a rarely-used, long-since-outdated legacy format. Its 
successor, FAT32 has been around for more than 20 years, and I'm not 
aware of anything more recent than the 3.5" floppy that uses it by 
default. I'd say it safely falls into the category of "Too much of an 
esoteric special-case to be worth requiring that special support be 
added in the main 'path of least resistance' interface (as long as 
there's nothing preventing the user from handling it on their own if 
they really need to.)"