phobo's std.file is completely broke!

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, September 15, 2018 6:54:50 AM MDT Josphe Brigmo via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 12:38:41 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe
>
> wrote:
> > On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 10:57:56 UTC, Josphe Brigmo
> >
> > wrote:
> >> Phobos *NEEDS* to be modified to work with these newer OS's.
> >
> > You need to look at the source code before posting. The code
> > for remove is literally
> >
> > DeleteFileW(name);
> >
> > it is a one-line wrapper, and obviously uses the unicode
> > version.
> >
> > https://github.com/dlang/phobos/blob/master/std/file.d#L1047
>
> It doesn't matter, the fact is that something in phobos is broke.
> Do you really expect me to do all the work? The fact that using
> executeShell or "\\?\" solves 90% of the problems(maybe all of
> them) proves that phobos is not up to par.

Using std.file should be on par with using the Windows API from C or C++. It
doesn't try to fix the arguably broken behavior of the Windows API with
regards to long paths but requires that the programmer deal with them just
like they would in C/C++. The main differences are that the std.file
functions in question use D strings rather than C strings, and they
translate them to the UTF-16 C strings for you rather than requiring you to
do it. But they don't do anything like add "\\?\" for you any more than the
Windows API itself does that.

If you consider that to be broken, then sorry. For better or worse, it was
decided that it was better to let the programmer deal with those intricacies
rather than trying to tweak the input to make it work based on the idea that
that could have undesirable consequences in some circumstances. On some
level, that does suck, but the Windows API does not make it easy to make
this work like it would on a *nix system without introducing subtle bugs.

If you find that the std.file functions don't work whereas using the same
input to the Windows API functions in C/C++ would have, then there's a bug
in the D code, and it needs to be fixed, but if it acts the same as the
C/C++ code, then it's working as intended.

- Jonathan M Davis