Bug 12114 – buildNormalizedPath shouldn't normalize current path to empty string

Currently, buildNormalizedPath("."), buildNormalizedPath("foo/.."), etc all return empty string. While buildNormalizedPath should indeed remove superfluous uses of "." within a path, paths that ultimately simplify to the current directory should result in "." not empty string (much like how buildNormalizedPath("..") returns ".."). This is for two reasons: 1. Other functions in std.path (rootName, driveName, extension) already use "" to mean "does not exist" which is very distinct from "current directory". When "current directory" is passed into buildNormalizedPath, the result should not be confusable with "does not exist". 2. To reduce the chances of accidental bugs like this: auto from = buildNormalizedPath(...); executeShell("cp "~from~ " target"); // Oops, the "from" argument might be missing! Note that an empty input (such as buildNormalizedPath(), buildNormalizedPath(""), or buildNormalizedPath("", "")) should still result in an empty string (as it does now) so that "does not exist" cannot get accidentally converted to "current directory": auto x = rootName("some/relative/path"); ... buildNormalizedPath(x); // Oops! A missing path got "normalized" to current directory.

(In reply to comment #0) > 2. To reduce the chances of accidental bugs like this: > auto from = buildNormalizedPath(...); > executeShell("cp "~from~ " target"); // Oops, the "from" argument might be > missing! For the record and as an aside, this is poor practice. escapeShellCommand should be used to build the command line, or (for this example) even better, execute instead of executeShell.

What should happen if you do buildNormalizedPath(".", "") ?

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/5462585245e3896b926dc8d39e72b17f55ffb003 Fix Issue 12114 buildNormalizedPath shouldn't normalize current path to empty string https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/3abf8c1a297429850949c424dee5f87b974f3f32 Merge pull request #2791 from CromFr/issue_12114 Fix Issue 12114 - buildNormalizedPath returns null instead of "."

There's a typo « It will return "." is the path leads to the starting directory ». Not « is » but « if ».

Commits pushed to 2.067 at https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/5462585245e3896b926dc8d39e72b17f55ffb003 Fix Issue 12114 https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/3abf8c1a297429850949c424dee5f87b974f3f32 Merge pull request #2791 from CromFr/issue_12114