bug#31601: Dired/Wdired: Play nicely with recursive list of files and directories.

[Keith David Bershatsky]

Attached is a draft/proof-concept patch.diff of my ideas regarding how to make 
dired/wdired play nicely with an arbitrary list of files and folders, including 
a recursive list.  I asked for some help on emacs.stackexchange.com to 
implement these new approaches, and used the answers by @Drew, @Tobias and 
@Andreas Röhler.  Citations to their answers are included in the 
draft/proof-concept patch.  I would need some help regarding how to update the 
dired-directory variable when deleting a file in a regular dired-mode buffer, 
and I have added a FIXME notation in the likely spot of `dired.el` -- the 
approach would be similar to renaming a file (already implemented in the 
attached draft patch), but is a bit more complicated due to potential recursive 
deletions.

The file-name-nondirectory components in wdired-mode now have read-only 
attributes so that a user no longer erroneously believes that he/she can modify 
them, and only latter see an error message when trying to commit the changes:  
file-error Renaming No such file or directory ....

I have only done some basic renaming of files and directories in wdired mode 
using both `find-name-dired` and `dired-list-files-folders' to populate the 
dired- buffer.  I did not spend any time implementing hash-tables to speed up 
the modification of the dired-directory variable, as that would likely involve 
modifying a few or more aspects of dired-mode.

Thanks,

Keith

patch.diff
Description: application/diff