Rails core - Jun 2006 - Routing patch and test question

I did this during RailsConf, while browsing the routing source:
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5507

I showed it to Nicholas on IRC, and he wondered why it didn''t just use
Pathname#cleanpath from the standard library, rather than reinventing
it.
That seemed like a good question to me, so I rewrote normalize_paths
to make use of that feature.

This produced a test failure on MacOS and Win32.  That struck me as
fairly odd, and I investigated.

It turns out that the canned test paths in the normalize_paths test
are unrealistic.
The windows test sets up test paths containing backslashes. However,
this isn''t what actually happens on a Windows system.  Here''s
a sample
of the actual load paths that get passed to normalize_paths on my
Win32 box (many removed, for readability.):

"./script/../config/../app/controllers/"
"./script/../config/../app"
"./script/../config/../components"
"./script/../config/../config"
"./script/../config/../lib"
"./script/../config/../vendor"
"./script/../config/../vendor/rails/railties"
"./script/../config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib"
"./script/../config/../vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/vendor"
"c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8"
"c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i386-msvcrt"
"c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8"
"c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mswin32"
"."
"./script/../config/../vendor/rails/railties/builtin/rails_info"

The normalize_paths method has been written to deal with backslashes,
and this is presumably why Pathname wasn''t used. However, this
doesn''t
actually seem to happen in Ruby.

I thought I''d toss that out there before writing another patch.
Changing the code and the tests for that code at the same time is
slightly riskier, but I think is warranted here.

Thanks,
--Wilson.

On 29-jun-2006, at 4:21, Wilson Bilkovich wrote:
> I did this during RailsConf, while browsing the routing source:
> http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5507
>
> I showed it to Nicholas on IRC, and he wondered why it didn''t just
use
> Pathname#cleanpath from the standard library, rather than reinventing
> it.
> That seemed like a good question to me, so I rewrote normalize_paths
> to make use of that feature.
I wondered about it when this feature was introduced, and I found  
that even the ole File.expand_path works better  - but
I thought it was the intention to normalize Windoze paths shal this  
need arise. But I got the same question - why so much code :-)

-- 
Julian ''Julik'' Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl