Re: inconsistent pathnames

>>>>> "WP" == Walter C Pelissero <[email protected]> writes:

    WP> At least on 19d this doesn't work:
    WP> * (namestring "...")

    WP> This is due to the fact that PARSE-NAMESTRING returns something that
    WP> LISP::UNPARSE-UNIX-FILE doesn't like:

    WP> * (describe (parse-namestring "..."))

    WP> #P(:NAME "...") is a structure of type PATHNAME.
    WP> HOST: #<LISP::UNIX-HOST>.
    WP> DEVICE: NIL.
    WP> DIRECTORY: NIL.
    WP> NAME: "...".
    WP> TYPE: NIL.
    WP> VERSION: NIL.

[patch snipped]

    WP> The patch does two things:
    WP>  - it parses "..." into a name=".." and type="" as it already did for
    WP>    namestrings like "foo."
    WP>  - it accepts (make-pathname :name ".." :type "") as consequence of #1

Shouldn't namestring (unparse-unix-file?) be changed to accept name
"..." and type nil?  This makes more sense to me since "abc" is parsed
as name "abc" and type nil.  But I guess name ".." and type "" is
acceptable too.

I also now see there are a whole bunch of issues, like how should
"..a" be parsed?  Is it name = "..a", type = nil, or name = ".", type
"a", or something else?  My head hurts.

    WP> Side note.
    WP> SBCL doesn't seem to suffer from this problem, but it looks like that
    WP> code might be quite different as it doesn't even try to handle "."
    WP> and ".." specially, unless they are followed by a "/".  Considering

I think these things were changed to get more print/read consistency
with pathnames.

    WP> that Unix allows things like "cat .", maybe SBCL's approach is the

On Solaris, Mac OS X, and Linux:

$ /bin/cat .
cat: input error on .: Is a directory

Ray