Relative aliases

[Christiaan Hofman]

On 26 Oct 2007, at 8:36 PM, Clark Cox wrote:

> On 10/26/07, Adam R. Maxwell <amaxwell at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Friday, October 26, 2007, at 11:16AM, "Markus Hitter" <mah at jump- 
>> ing.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> Am 26.10.2007 um 17:28 schrieb Christiaan Hofman:
>>>
>>>> We are trying to create aliases using the Alias Manager with a
>>>> relative path.
>>>
>>> What stops you from using symbolic links? I know, Apple drops more
>>> and more Unix goodies, but links appear to have a longer lifetime,
>>> Time Machine just offered a new version of them.
>>
>> The point of this is to be able to serialize a list of files to  
>> disk on one system, relative
>> to e.g. the document location, then be able to locate them on  
>> another system with a
>> potentially different directory structure (but the same location  
>> relative to the
>> document).  Symlinks aren't going to help with that.
>
> Why wouldn't symlinks work for this?
>
> -- 
> Clark S. Cox III
> clarkcox3 at gmail.com

Are you talking about symlinks, or (relative) paths? The former is a  
special type of file on the file system and has nothing to do with  
data to save. Moreover, symlinks are not versatile enough. Aliases do  
much more than symlinks, they should be able to find file by relative  
or absolute path or by file ID. We want to have all of this  
functionality to be as robust as possible, not just what a relative  
path has to offer. And anyway, I'm not talking about how I could find  
a workaround for this problem (I could figure that out if I need to).  
I am asking what the problem *is* and whether it is a real bug.  
Because the documentation on Alias Manager tell me that I should be  
able to do this with aliases alone.

Christiaan