Dired commands don't work on current and parent directories

[Sven Joachim]

There is an incompatible change in Emacs 22: Many dired commands (as
far as I can see everything in dired's "Operate" menu) refuse to work
on the current and parent directories, signalling the error
 "Cannot operate on `.' or `..'".

I understand that this may be a feature rather than a bug, since many
of the commands in dired's "Operate" menu won't work on these
directories, while others may be potentially dangerous. But

 a) Some commands, like dired-do-touch or dired-do-symlink, are
    perfectly legitimate, and

 b) this is currently nowhere mentioned, and I think there should be
    entries in the NEWS file and the Emacs manual.

My Emacs version is:

 GNU Emacs 22.0.50.1 (i386-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.6.4)
 of 2005-08-13 on debian, modified by Debian

Recent messages:
dired-get-filename: Cannot operate on `.' or `..' [4 times]


Regards,

--

 Sven Joachim