On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Ken Murchison wrote:
I'm willing to fix this, if we can decide which output is correct. Do we insert a separator as Tim suggests, or backtrack to the first separator in the reference as Mark suggests? I think I prefer Tim's idea.
Although Tim's idea seems more obvious, I'll argue that my suggestion is the more useful one.
You can already get the "connected directory" behavior by having a reference that ends with the hierarchy delimiter; this is what clients which use the reference for a connected directory do now.
But suppose you want a parallel name to a selected mailbox. My suggestion gives that. Tim's just duplicates the "connected directory" behavior.
I tried to spend a few minutes thinking about this over the past couple days. Mark's implementation is certainly more powerful, although I still find it really odd. I can't get a good counter argument going.
Either a.b.c.d or a.c.d is better than a.bc.d, and given Pine is the dominant user of this, perhaps a.c.d is the better answer. I don't think I like it, actually, but it's better to have one interpretation in the wild than two (or three, which is where I think we currently are).
Given Mark's second paragraph above, if we can just accept that as law going forward, not only do I suspect it's for the best, but I also suspect there will be (near :-)) zero transition problems.
Tim
