Re: Glib: a Win32 discussion

[Kean Johnston <kean johnston gmail com>]

On 4/7/2011 4:29 PM, Colin Walters wrote:
> If your application deals with uids, I think you're going to end up
> with platform-specific code; the complexities around identity are just
> too high.  That goes doubly for inode numbers, which - why would you
> care unless you're a backup app, and then you're *definitely* going to
> get into platform specific stuff.
In the context of stat, I disagree. Let's suppose you were making a 
new-fangled version of tar. Forget for the moment that the specification 
for tar may impose limitations on how many bits wide uid/gid's are. You 
want your code to be as minimally system-dependent as possible, so you use 
glib. If glib provides its own GlibStat structure, and the elements in that 
structure are sufficiently wide for all current platforms and reasonable 
use, this is useful. That program needs to know if two files are the same 
so it checks on inode numbers and only includes the body of the file once 
in the archive. So far, nothing particularly system dependent there. If you 
*DO* need system dependent stuff, *then* you can use struct stat (or 
whatever structure you like), with suitable conditionals protecting that 
code, but the average code path that uses struct stat to check for minimal 
information such as file size, last modification time and occasionally 
ownership (frequently just checking to see if uid/gid are 0) having a 
platform-independent structure is a big win for portability.

Kean