bug#6339: url-filename => "/c:/some/file.txt"

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 00:31, Lennart Borgman
<lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:

> Are we not dealing with two different file name syntaxes here that
> just happens to look very similar? I.e. the URL file name syntax and
> the unix style file name syntax.

I would expect that an accessor for the filename slot of a struct
called URL would interpret the struct as a URL, and the "filename" of
the URL does not start with a slash. Why would I expect that
url-filename (url-generic-parse-url, in fact) returns anything "unix
style" specific?

> url-filename is now returning the file name in unix style.

No.

  (url-generic-parse-url "file:///C:/my/file.xt") => [cl-struct-url
"file" nil nil "" 21 "/C:/my/file.txt" nil nil t nil]

That's not a "file name in unix style", that's a bug, clear and
simple. There's no reason why url-generic-parse-url should think that
a URL is in some kind of "unix style". What if it is a VMS filename?

> This is, as
> you said, practical, but a bit surprising. I suspect there are some
> small mixing of those syntaxes elsewhere too. My suggestion would be
> to keep them and document them.

"Keep them and document them" still means that it does not work for
Windows or VMS or anything not POSIX-style. And fixing it just for
these systems means that we keep a bug for POSIX sake and make other
systems jump around hoops. Ugly, to say the least.

    Juanma