[jira] [Created] (COMPRESS-365) Use java.nio.file.Path instead of java.io.File

["Ben Butler-Cole (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Ben Butler-Cole created COMPRESS-365:
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             Summary: Use java.nio.file.Path instead of java.io.File
                 Key: COMPRESS-365
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COMPRESS-365
             Project: Commons Compress
          Issue Type: Improvement
            Reporter: Ben Butler-Cole


When testing code that does file I/O it is faster and provides better isolation to use an in-memory filesystem. The standard way of doing that is to use the java.nio.file package for all file I/O and provide an in-memory implementation of java.nio.file.FileSystem (for example Jimfs (https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.google.jimfs/jimfs)).

Unfortunately it's impossible to do this if code anywhere in the stack converts back to java.io.File. So it's currently impossible to use Commons Compress with an in-memory filesystem. To enable this there would need to be java.io.file.Path versions of all API methods that currently take java.io.File objects and the implementation would need to be changed to use java.nio.file classes throughout.

I can see that this is a fair bit of work (although when I've done similar conversions it's been fairly easy to drive by leaning on the IDE and type system). But you would get big implementation advantages from doing this because java.nio.file makes lots of things easy that are tedious with java.io and provides more safety around fallible operations. 



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