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Re: Issue: PATHNAME-COMPONENT-CASE (Version 1)



This issue had  a flurry of discussion back in July, but I have no record of any
traffic since. 

As the issue says "This does not solve the whole pathname problem, but it does
improve the situation for a clearly defined set of very common problems."

Is it worth putting this requirement on PATHNAME implementations if it doesn't
really improve portability of real applications?

My general experience is that even within a single application, users have
difficulty writing portable code because of a lack of "logical" pathnames --
they write code that reads in files and data from servers that don't exist when
at the site to which the code is shipped. This stuff, about case, doesn't seem
to have much real effect.

The only examples in the issue writeup relate to multiple-file-system hosts
where the host file system conventions are visible to the Lisp itself.
(Sometimes, the file access protocol itself will map file names into a 'native'
naming convention before Lisp even sees it.)