RE: UNC and POSIX paths

[<gmt at malth dot us>]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2013, at 11:19, Larry Hall (Cygwin) thusly quipped:
> So it's a question of convenience vs correctness.  It seems the argument
offered
> is that it is convenient to allow incorrect scripts.  An alternate
argument could be
> made that it is equally convenient to continue having Cygwin correctly
interpret
> '//' as it has been.  In addition, since the UNC interpretation of paths
comes for
> free (it's a Windows feature), it would be pretty inconvenient to make
Cygwin
> work otherwise.
> 
> I don't think the convenience vs correctness argument is going to inspire
> someone to action. ;-)

On Mon, 17 Jun 2013, at 12:01, Dan Kegel thusly quipped:
> Andrew DeFaria wrote:
>> I'm confused. Let me ask a different way - why not fix such scripts
instead?
>> That's all I'm asking.
> 
> He's probably daunted by the thought.
> 
> If he really wants to change the world here, he should consider writing a
tool
> that scanned for such problems, and lobbying to get it included in some
broadly
> used suite of checks like lintian.
> - Dan

Geez, tough ml.  If you are referring to me, you've misunderstood.

This was a rhetorical exercise, not an advocacy campaign :)  At no point
have I advocated not fixing broken scripts, or changing the world in any
way.  And I am undaunted by thoughts.  Mostly, I couldn't resist giving a
literal answer to Andrew's (maybe-not-so-literally-intended) question of
"why not fix it?" (nevertheless, I did fix it, already).

Plus, I reasoned that, as somebody who could have benefited from OP's
proposal in the past, I was in a good position to play devil's advocate (I
expected the other side of the argument would be adequately presented by
everyone else but me).

BTW, along the same lines, I stated previously it would break
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob_plain;f=m4/double-sl
ash-root.m4.  Turns out I was wrong, the m4 has a hard-coded list of
platforms.  So, I have to say, I can't think of one technical or merit-based
reason this shouldn't be done, aside from the fact that it's annoying to
hear it endlessly brought up on the mailing list (a problem which an
implementation would, in fact, solve, not exacerbate).

-gmt



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