[jamming] Path specification (was: Majam - keeping jamup-to-date)

[Alen Ladavac]

Eduard wrote:
> In Java a file name is represented in a canonical form, that is with
> a '/' as component separator. We may look at their solution to 
> cross-platform file names.

This is a good idea. Do you know more details of that solution?

> Maybe we do need modifiers at all, and jam can be smart enough to do it for us
> --input--
> When jam, interprets a string constant value it performs a scan to 
> see if it contains a file name. ....

Let's not make this overly complicated please. Specifying conversions
manually worked perfectly for me so far.

> --output--
> When a variable is expanded in an action body any of its elements 
> that represent file names are converted to the platform that executes 
> the actions.

I'd like to point out that one of the reasons I needed this in the
first place was because some of the tools on Win32 that I used
actually _prefered_ Unix-like paths. So automatic conversions in
actions is not a good idea.

> In order to get there the internal variable definition needs to 
> include a marker that indicates if it is a file name or not.

This also sounds complicated. JM2C.

Cheers,
Alen