On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Alexander Lamaison
... Is it time for a Boost.Filesystem v4 to result from an in-depth discussion on here?
Probably not since the C++ standard committee is so far along with a Filesystem Technical Specification (TS). Once that ships (possibly later this year), Boost.Filesystem will be brought into sync with the TS. That doesn't involve much functional change, but it will cause a major update to the Boost.Filesystem reference documentation.
I'd hope it would take the best of v3 while removing some of the hurt it introduced in the process. For example, my top two issues are: - unclear generic/native path handling
See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n3505.html The committee's Filesystem Study Group put a lot of effort into clarifying the class path specs.
- methods returning a 'path' for stuff that isn't a path but just needs a unicode string
Support for C++11 u16string and u32string will make that a bit easier, but it is really a misuse of class path. The real fix is improved string interoperability, and there is work going on separate from Boost.Filesystem to address that. -Beman