Support relative paths

[Stebalien]

The current path type doesn't support relative paths. I'm not sure how best to do this or even if we want to do this but, for now, symlink "targets" will have to just be arbitrary strings.

[magik6k]

How about a new type:

type RelativePath interface {
  Path // Path methods resolve Base + Target

  // Target returns raw symlink target
  Target() string

  // Base return path of the symlink parent
  Base() Path
}

RelativePath.Path.String() would look roughly like this:

func (relPath *relativePath) String() string {
  if path.IsAbs(relPath.target) {
    return relPath.target
  }
  return path.Join(relPath..base, relPath.target)
}

Thoughts?

cc @warpfork

[Stebalien]

That should cover much of it. Unfortunately, there's still the issue of absolute symlinks. The current Path system assumes that all paths have a namespace. However, a symlink could point to /usr/share/....

[magik6k]

Users could just use .Target in that case. Path methods would just yield invalid paths (we should somehow make them error, but things like:

type RelativePath interface {
  Path() (Path, error)

would make the interface less convenient.)

[Stebalien]

I agree. Really, my question is: "should Symlink.Target be a Path or just a string. I think the conclusion here is that it should just be a string.

[hacdias]

This repository is no longer maintained and has been copied over to Boxo. We are now in the process of reviewing issues and PRs and moving the ones that are still relevant. This issue has been merged with a few other issues, and moved to ipfs/boxo#198.