Re: Glib: a Win32 discussion

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 2:12 AM, Kean Johnston <kean johnston gmail com> wrote:
> 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.

But is anyone really doing this?   Even if someone was, I have trouble
thinking that it makes sense to invest a lot in GLib's I/O just for
it.

> 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.

Yeah except for a decent tar app, you really want to know about
extended attributes say, which is a whole other set of API already
wrapped in Gio.