Re: Accessing /:path in XEmacs
Hrvoje Niksic writes:
Kyle Jones <kyle_jones(a)wonderworks.com> writes:
> > Is this a serious proposal or a quick hack suggestion? I'd
> > rather do it right than introduce ugly hacks.
>
> I consider it serious. I don't want this stuff hacked into the
> guts of Fexpand_file_name or something like that. I've had to
> hack extraneous filename munging out of Emacs in the past.
> //path had a special meaning (...)
But /: is designed exactly to solve these problems. In your case, you
would access // as /:// and things would just work. /: is not yet
another special meaning, it *removes* special meanings.
You still lose because you're heaping hack upon crock upon
kludge. Emacs is not an island. Filenames passed into Emacs
on the command line would need this /: thing added. And
filenames passed from Emacs to UNIX commands will need to
remove it. And the electric slash thing that the minibuffer
does when you type // would still have to be hacked out. The
filesystem I mentioned implemented a network filesystem. You
could write //host/foo/bar to access /foo/bar on 'host'. It
did its magic at the filesystem level and so it worked with
everything.
/: does seem handy to evade the file handlers and if we're got to
have it we might as well not invent a different kludge. Go ahead
and do it. I'll just avert my eyes.