path_abs: Absolute serializable path types and associated methods.

See the library docs for information on the types

The rust Path and PathBuf are great when you are constructing paths on the filesystem that may or may not exist, or you care immensely about performance and don't want the overhead of creating absolute (canonicalized) paths.

However, they have several downsides:

• They are not ergonomic. Actually using paths requires you to go through fs module, namely File, OpenOptions, create_dir, etc. It is NOT fun. PathAbs provides convienient methods -- you already know the path exists, now you just want to do things with it. You can read/write/etc using methods defined directly on PathFile and PathDir.
• Comparing paths is not reliable. Is /foo/bar/baz the same path as bar/baz? It's impossible to tell without knowing the current directory and the state of symlinks.
• It is impossible to know from the type whether a path exists (or indeed, ever existed) or what its filetype is. Most applications are not deleting files, so validating that a path exists once is usually "good enough", but no such validation is guaranteed with Path. This is not wrong -- Path is supposed to represent just a "string of cross-platform bits". However, ensuring that you are only "referencing paths that once existed" is very helpful to reduce unexpected errors in your application.
• There is no way to serialize Paths in an effective manner. Actually getting the data has to happen through std::os::<platform>::ffi::OsStrExt and is different on windows and linux. Even worse, window's UTF-16 can be ill-formed which is invalid UTF-8, so cannot be encoded into UTF-8 directly. PathAbs solves this by using the stfu8 crate under the hood.

LICENSE

The source code in this repository is Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.