Re: _wstat on Windows (actually stat stuff in general)

[Kean Johnston <kean johnston gmail com>]

> Ugh, how weird and unexpected. (My expectation would have been that
> neither supports symbolic links.) For which C runtime is this, btw,
> the system msvcrt.dll, or some of the MSVC-version-specific ones?
The MSDN documentation doesn't specify. I suspect its all of them TBH.

> Instead, we should just use the Win32 API to fill in the meaningful
> fields of a struct stat. Yeah, following symbolic links manually might
> be painful; I have no idea how to do that.
Well I speak under correction but its my belief that The other API's follow 
them for you. I'm fairly certain GetFileAttributesEx() does.

> (Of course, when I say "we", I actually mean "you", as I don't really
> take much part in GLib/GTK+ development currently... sorry. Just
> noticed this thread when browsing the gtk-devel-list archove, and
> *had* to follow-up...)
Glad you did :)

> That is a glaring omission only if you misunderstand the purpose of
> gstdio.h. It is not supposed to be a wrapper for any file I/O related
> functions. Its sole purpose (at least when it was created) is to take
> care of the *file name* problems. It even says this in a comment:
Ah I had missed that bit.

> Beafing up gstdio.h now is too late. All newer file system portability
> related stuff in GLib is in GIO, surely.
Sure but if all I want to know how big a file is, do I *really* want to 
link in all of that extra crud? GIO is huge. There are times when the low 
level functions are just plain appropriate.

I've given up on the idea of a universal stat structure, but the g_stat() 
wrapper is still useful on Windows exactly because of the file name issue. 
People really do want to use stat rather than GIO. I do, and I've had 
private emails from others who do too. Right now though the biggest 
deficiency with it (aside from the symlinks and _wstat thing which needs to 
be addressed differently) is the actual stat structure you chose. It only 
supports 32-bit (well 31) file sizes and that's a real problem on Windows 
these days where ISO images are frequent and much larger than 2GB. I would 
dearly *love* to change that but that will mean breaking the ABI. Of course 
since everyone is off using GIO that shouldn't break too many people should 
it :) But that structure can be changed in a non-ABI breaking way and I 
hope to at least get that much past the powers that be.

Kean