From: Justin Johnson <justinjohnson@...>
Date: 2005-12-31T03:36:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Path Separator and Windows

Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On 30/12/05, Justin Johnson <justinjohnson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Regardless of the history I am still of the opinion that something
>> should change. From this thread it seems that Ruby may have chosen to
>> use / everywhere to keep things consistent. Can anyone confirm that
>> this really is the decision? If so, it presents the following problems
>> for Windows users.
>>
>> 1) When a program displays paths back to users they all use / instead
>>    of \ which isn't consistent with how the OS presents the paths to
>>    the user.
> 
> I don't personally see this as an issue. I might think that having a
> method #localize for Pathname might be good that does the conversion for
> you.
> 
>> 2) Trying to run a program in backticks for example with the paths
>>    using / fails.
> 
> Then backticks, %x{}, and Kernel#system should probably look for / in
> the command portion and change it to backslash.

This seems like a reasonable solution to me.

1) Change backticks, %x{}, and Kernel#system to change slashes to 
platform's path separator before running commands.  Any other things 
need this?
2) Add a method to Pathname??? to convert to platform's path separators 
for convenience.  Anything else need this?

Without at least #1 above it seems slightly broken to me (at least not 
what one would expect), since you can have a path to an executable in a 
Pathname but then you can't even run the command without doing a gsub on 
it's string representation.

> 
>> I think a reasonable solution would be to allow the programmer to
>> configure how Ruby will behave, for example by allowing them to change
>> a global variable for the path separator. I figured this would be
>> doable but haven't found a way to do so yet. I also still think it
>> makes more sense to default to the line separater the OS uses, which
>> is \ for Windows regardless of what the API allows.
> 
> I disagree completely. Ruby's paths should always use '/' and the pieces
> of Ruby which interact with the command-processor and/or the filesystem
> should do the separator translation.
> 
> -austin


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