Re: PATCH: relpath

[Dmitry V. Levin]

On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 12:21:03PM +0000, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 12/01/2011 12:10 PM, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 12:07:00PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
[...]
> >> Pádraig Brady and I talked about this today, and he suggested to call this 
> >> new program realpath, and with usage like this:
> >> 
> >> realpath --relative-start=DIR FILE ...
> > 
> > In that case, please make its interface compatible with Debian's realpath: 
> > http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=realpath 
> > http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/robert/realpath.git
> 
> Which is:
> 
> realpath [-s|--strip] [-z|--zero]  filename  ...
> 
> I.E. the same except that debian's also has a --strip option to:
> "Only strip . and .., components, but do not resolve symlinks".
> 
> If we implement --strip, then it means Debian could prefer the
> coreutils version, which is a superset.

This would probably mean implementing a CAN_STRIP mode for
canonicalize_filename_mode().
As a side effect, readlink(1) could be taught to use it with a new
option, e.g. --canonicalize-strip.

> Using realpath, means we get more related functionality
> into a single tool, and also we overlap with FreeBSDs util
> of the same name. No options proposed so far conflict with
> existing implementations.

The only drawback with this realpath interface is that by allowing to
process several file names at once it makes error handling in scripts harder.


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