[PD] [file]: paths not relative to patch

[Roman Haefeli]

On Fri, 2022-01-07 at 23:20 +0100, Christof Ressi wrote:
> > 
> 
> And what would you *do* want to use the current working directory?

The patch's own directory, like all other file writing objects do.


> Generally, [file] doesn't do any magic.

I don't consider starting from a sane working directory magic.

>  If you want to resolve an 
> existing file using Pd's canvas: use [file which]. If you want create
> a 
> new file relative to the patch, use [dir( -> [pdcontrol].

That's what I do now. That's the easy part. The less easy part is
reliably detecting whether a given path is relative. But knowing that
even Pd does it somewhat clumsily, I'll stick to the clumsy solution
(checking for / and :).
> 
> > Yeah, this works fine for finding already existing files, but as
> > the
> > help-file says, you cannot resolve directories with. So, it cannot
> > be
> > used for
> 
> But that's a general limitation of Pd. At the moment, it can only 
> resolve files but not directories. This limitation can, of course,
> be 
> removed and then [file which] will work as expection.

Thinking about it some more, this isn't a severe limitation. As I
understand, it looks into all search paths. However, when I configure
'myblobs' as directory, I don't mean to write to any other 'myblobs'
directory that might be returned by [file which]. I think [file which]
shouldn't be for finding directories to write new files into. It should
only be used for finding existing files. 


> > I only need to append the
> > configured path to the patch's path if the configured path is a
> > relative path. But how can I reliably detect that?
> I think what we actually need is something like [file isabsolute]
> and 
> [file isrelative]! That would be a trivial but very useful addition.

I think those would be valuable additions.

Roman



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