Re: [Vimprobable-users] Improve handling of file parameters

[Hannes S. <ha...@yl...>]

Hi!

Morgan Howe <mt...@gm...> wrote:
> I look at a lot of test generated html output and the like, so I
> frequently hit problems with file paths. Because of the URI, things
> would only open properly if I provided a full path, or something that
> would be expanded by the shell into a full path such as
> ~/html/index.html. Modified to use realpath() to fix this issue. It
> would also fail to detect file parameters without a "/" in the path
> (e.g. "index.html"), so changed to use stat() instead of looking for
> "/" or "./" when determining if an argument is a file. This takes care
> of any issues I have run into with using vimprobable to view local
> files.

Hmm... well, this seems to work as advertised, but I'd like to hear
some opinions. As far as I can see, your problem boils down to

a) relative paths not being recognised (e.g. ../dir/file.htm).
b) you assuming that . should be in the search path (e.g. index.htm).

The second one, I don't really consider a problem, to be honest. You
could easily just write

vimprobable ./index.htm

on your command line. Your solution would make it impossible to call
URLs from a directory which has a file or subdirectory with the same
name as the URL. E.g. if your file system looks like this:

.
..
www.example.org

and you call

vimprobable www.example.org

it will call the local directory instead of the URL. No workaround
possible. Before someone argues that this is a rather academic example,
I would like to point out that such a directory structure is not so
uncommon on machines used for web development.

The first one, though, I cannot really argue against.

In the end, I would say it is a matter of policy what the browser
should 'assume', i.e. what it should give preference to. Right now, by
using a very restrictive definition of calling local files, external
URLs are always given preference. I'm not totally against changing this
a bit in the way you describe.

Does anyone else have an opinion?

Hannes