[phobos] What's the status of listDir/listdir ?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On 2011-06-10 09:21, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On 2011-06-10 05:22, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> > On 10.06.2011 16:19, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > > On 6/10/11 4:47 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > >> The main problem with dirEntries is essentially as you point out. It
> > >> doesn't
> > >> work with anything but foreach. You can't even pass it to
> > >> std.array.array to
> > >> create an array. And it's because it's set up to work with either a
> > >> string or
> > >> a DirEntry for the loop variable. The advantage of listdir/listDir is
> > >> that you
> > >> get an actual array of strings to use when you need to pass it to
> > >> something.
> > >> Ideally, DirIterator wolud be made to work with more, but it hasn't
> > >> been. I
> > >> don't know if we want to try and turn it into a range or what, but it
> > >> is a bit
> > >> of a problem if you want to use dirEntries outside of a foreach loop.
> > > 
> > > Any chance of somebody finding the time to transform dirEntries into
> > > an input range? That would solve everything.
> > 
> > I decided to try just that. It will take some time though.
> 
> The only thing that I can think of doing is making it so that DirIterator
> is a range with element type DirEntry and make DirEntry have an alias this
> to its name property. I _think_ that that will give the same behavior as
> the current behavior. Certainly, I don't know how else we'd do it. The
> ability to have multiple iteration types for the same range is not exactly
> one of ranges strong points.

The more I think about it, the more I think that this is the correct solution. 
I just don't see any other way to do it. And it should actually be pretty easy 
to do. The main question is whether we want to mess with DirIterator's 
internals with regards to _listDir and its delegate solution. And that's 
completely up to you, but I think that I'd be inclined to leave it alone for 
the moment (probably until listdir and listDir are gone), since it's fewer 
changes and fewer places to introduce bugs.

- Jonathan M Davis