RE: [h-e-w] Absolute/relative pathnames under nt

[Underwood, Jonathan]

> Agreed, but this is still no reason for ~ to be substituted 
> for the absolute
> path of the users directory under windows NT within ntemacs 
> in exactly the
> same manner as under unix. Then everything would be 
> consistent. The naming
> convention for directories relative to some root is indeed 
> different under
> unix and nt, but this seems irrelevant here. 

Oops, clearly i meant "this is still no reason for ~ NOT to be substituted 
for the absolute path of the users HOME directory under NT within ntemacs"

I should learn to type :)

jonathan.

> 
> > 
> > /home/john/tests/mirror/x.c and /etc/bin/rc.local
> > 
> > have consistent file naming information based on the root 
> > directory '/', 
> > but /home and /etc can be completely different drives. On 
> Windows the 
> > equivalent would be something like:
> > 
> > c:\john\tests\mirror\x.c and d:\bin\rc.local
> > 
> > i.e. there is no absolute root directory equivalent to '/' 
> in Windows 
> > (unless you count "My Computer" but that is more of a 
> > conceptual root than 
> > an actual directory).
> > 
> > You also have to consider the possibility of network names like:
> > 
> > \\MYSERVER\SHARE1
> > 
> > On Windows.
> > 
> > > It seems to me that for ntemacs, given that ntemacs needs a 
> > home directory
> > > to be specified via the HOME environment variable,
> > 
> > Well, not quite true because if the HOME variable doesn't 
> > exist in Windows, 
> > NT Emacs will use c:\ as the equivalent (I think).
> > 
> > > and that emacs
> > > understands the ~ to represent this home directory, that 
> > ntemacs should also
> > > allow absolute filenames to begin with ~ a la unix.
> > 
> > > This would make things a lot easier for eg. using load-file 
> > in your .emacs
> > > for loading files consistently on different platforms etc.
> > 
> > It may be me who's getting confused here, (correct me if I'm 
> > wrong) but '~' 
> > is only absolute because (as I said it above) it is 
> > effectively substited 
> > for an absolute pathname before being used.
> > 
> > 
> > Best Regards
> > John McCabe
> > 
> > 
>