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From: malcolm@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Malcolm Slaney)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: symbolic links are a botch
Message-ID: <2371@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: Thu, 25-Jun-87 04:15:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: spar.2371
Posted: Thu Jun 25 04:15:13 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Jun-87 01:02:48 EDT
References: <7879@brl-adm.ARPA> <2211@bunker.UUCP>
Reply-To: malcolm@spar.UUCP (Malcolm Slaney)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research - CASLAB
Lines: 24
Summary: Multiple Prefixes are CONFUSING!!!

In article <6018@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>It seems to me we're gradually wobbling our way towards the idea that
>the "current working directory" is really just a "prefix" to be used
>for relative path resolution.  This approach is taken by some OSes
>(Apple ProDOS being one I'm quite familiar with) and it seems to work
>fine.  Indeed, it generalizes nicely so that one can have a handful of
>current prefixes simultaneously available, e.g. one for libraries, one
>for commands, etc.
>
In effect Symbolics machines have taken this concept to extreme and
I think it is a lose.  Just about every user operation has a different
concept of the current directory and I have yet to figure out their rhyme
or reason.  In some case, like editor buffers, it is pretty obvious but 
in other cases it isn't.

For example the "copy file" command has a default directory which generally
is identical to the last directory used.  I'm sure if I did a bit of
investigation I could figure it out its exact behaviour but that really
shouldn't be necessary.

At least Symbolics does show you the current default directory/pathname
whenever you have to enter something.

								Malcolm