Quoting [Ceriel Jacobs] (Dec 03 2007):
B: why the limitation to relative path names?
Not really needed, indeed, but conceptually, wildcard expansion operates on a directory, and we are talking about methods on directories here.
Sorry for being thick: yes, they operate on a directory, but how does that imply relative paths? E.g., the following calls expand on the contents of a single directory, but would be impossible with relative paths: rm /tmp/* cp /tmp/*/*.jpg /home/user/images/tmp/
With B, the user can directly pass the wildcard string to, e.g., copy. The "trick" is that the string is restricted in its expressiveness, namely to pathnames relative to the CWD.
For C speaks that '*' is, probably, the most commonly used wildcard - so using that in the standard URL calls would help a lot. As for the other wildcards, a detour via expand does not sound too bad anymore...
I can live with C :-) although it is a bit of an ad-hoc solution. I like B a bit better, because it is more explicit about which methods accept wildcards.
Good points. Thanks, Andre.
Ceriel
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