As it was written before the rule had 'random' behavior in some borderline cases such as: not passing it a parameter, passing it a folder whose path starts with one or two backslashes (as opposed to slashes) or passing it an invalid rooted path with enough '..' path elements to take it 'before the root path'. In those cases it would cause an access violation, 'incorrectly' un-root the path (i.e. remove the leading slash) or simply remove a 'random' path modification respectively. Also the rule is now more tiny bit more efficient and much better documented.
Invalid rooted paths with enough '..' path elements to take them 'before the root path' are now recognized and an empty list is returned.
Due to this rule having such 'messy' behavior the path.join rule and its user make-NT rule had some twisted logic in them to work around all the problems this caused. This patch invalidates the logic in question and replaces it with a much simpler one (detailed comments added).
Other NORMALIZE_PATH callers should not be affected since both the old and the new version work the same on 'regular' paths (i.e. those not mentioned above).
The new functionality for recognizing Boost Jam versions has been used to make Boost Build scripts use the old path functionality when using Boost Jam older than 3.1.17 and use the new functionality otherwise. As consequence, now anyone using the trunk version of Boost Build and an older 3.1.17 version of Boost.Jam will need to recompile their Boost Jam executable.
The patch does not cause any Boost Build or Boost Jam tests to fail.
Added a related NORMALIZE_PATH Boost Jam test. Note that this test causes Boost Jam versions built prior to this patch to crash (access violation).
Added additional internal Boost Build tests for the path.jam module testing how it handles some invalid Windows paths.
[SVN r45158]
Among other things this was breaking the new Boost Jam version detection functionality in some realistic cases. Added related regression tests.
[SVN r45100]
* Removed trailing spaces.
* Added a comment for code discovering the user's home-directories.
* Removed a stale regex import.
* Removed an old corpse 'identity' rule found inside the __test__ rule.
[SVN r42884]
* bjam; bump to version 3.1.12
* bjam; make it possible to build in MinGW/MSYS shell
* bjam; move profile code to debug.h/c to make it available for use everywhere
* bjam; cache all filesystem query operations, Unix and Windows only, include PWD and scanning
* bjam; add memory profile info, and sprinkle throught code
* bbv2; rewrite some while() loops into for() loops to reduce time and memory
* bbv2; keep a single instance counter instead of one per type to reduce memory use
* bjam+bbv2; change NORMALIZE_PATH builtin to join path parts to reduce memory use
[SVN r31177]
