On 7-Jun-2012, Paul Eggert wrote:
| Much of gnulib has never been ported to MSVC / MingW
| and apparently octave is using that part. I suggest
| using Cygwin.
If it were up to me, I'd go a step further and say, "don't use
Windows," but the reality is that that's not going to fly with many of
Octave's users and developers. (insert emoticon of your choosing
here).
Octave already uses quite a few modules from gnulib (see list at the
bottom of this message) and up until now, it is working on Windows
systems with MinGW and MSVC. So it seems a lot of things do work on
those systems. The use of mkdir-p is a recent addition and is not
critical, so for now I've removed the patch that added that module to
Octave.
In any case, I am curious about the design of this module. Could
someone shed some light on why it is so complex, and why that
complexity is exposed? Looking at mkdir-p.h, I was quite surprised to
find that the only function it declares is
struct savewd;
bool make_dir_parents (char *dir,
struct savewd *wd,
int (*make_ancestor) (char const *, char const *,
void *),
void *options,
mode_t mode,
void (*announce) (char const *, void *),
mode_t mode_bits,
uid_t owner,
gid_t group,
bool preserve_existing);
I was expecting to find a simple interface that covers what I would
think is the most common case of creating a directory tree: do exactly
the same thing as mkdir, but iterate over the directories given (as a
string, separated by DIRSEP):
int mkdir_with_parents (const char *dirname, mode_t mode)
At least on the surface, this seems like a simple operation. But
looking into the implementation of mkdir-p, I was even more surprised
when I found that the mkancesdirs and savewd modules that it depends
on ultimately call fork.
I admit to never having looked into implementing this operation in a
robust way, so perhaps all this complexity is required. But it would
definitely help mere mortals to use mkdir-p if there were a simpler
way to use this module for what I assume is the most common use case.
jwe
Here is the module list printed by a bootstrap run in Octave's source tree:
Module list with included dependencies (indented):
alloca
alloca-opt
at-internal
c-ctype
c-strcase
canonicalize-lgpl
chdir
chdir-long
cloexec
close
closedir
configmake
copysign
copysignf
crypto/md5
d-ino
d-type
dirent
dirfd
dirname-lgpl
dosname
double-slash-root
dup
dup2
errno
error
exitfail
extensions
fchdir
fclose
fcntl
fcntl-h
fd-hook
fdopendir
fflush
filemode
filename
filenamecat-lgpl
float
floor
fnmatch
fopen
fpieee
fpurge
freading
fseek
fseeko
fstat
fstatat
ftell
ftello
getcwd
getcwd-lgpl
getdtablesize
gethostname
getlogin_r
getopt-gnu
getopt-posix
gettext-h
gettimeofday
glob
include_next
intprops
isatty
isnand-nolibm
isnanf-nolibm
isnanl-nolibm
largefile
link
localcharset
lseek
lstat
malloc-posix
malloca
math
mbrtowc
mbsinit
mbsrtowcs
memchr
mempcpy
memrchr
mkdir
mkfifo
mkostemp
mkstemp
mktime
msvc-inval
msvc-nothrow
multiarch
nanosleep
nocrash
nproc
open
openat
openat-die
openat-h
opendir
pathmax
progname
raise
readdir
readlink
realloc-posix
rename
rewinddir
rmdir
round
roundf
same-inode
save-cwd
select
sigaction
signal
signal-h
signbit
sigprocmask
size_max
sleep
snippet/_Noreturn
snippet/arg-nonnull
snippet/c++defs
snippet/warn-on-use
socketlib
sockets
socklen
ssize_t
stat
stdalign
stdbool
stddef
stdint
stdio
stdlib
strcase
strdup-posix
streq
strerror
strerror-override
strftime
string
strings
strnlen1
strptime
symlink
sys_select
sys_socket
sys_stat
sys_time
sys_times
sys_types
sys_uio
tempname
time
time_r
times
tmpdir
tmpfile
trunc
truncf
unistd
unistd-safer
unlink
vasnprintf
vasprintf
verify
wchar
wctype-h
xsize
