Paths and path resolution

Hello XProc fans,

At the moment I am interested in URI resolution. Specifically, I would like
to be able to determine when "path/to/file.xml" and
"path/to/the/same/../../file.xml" will get me the same file (without
getting the file).

The XProc Spec says not a whole lot about this, while it is not difficult
to get functions static-base-uri(), resolve-uri(), p:urify() etc. to
present paths with ".." or "." i.e. this normalization is not built in.

What the spec does say is a bit, um, careful:

> In some URI schemes, it is possible for different URIs to identify “the
same” resource. Consider, for example, file:/path/file and
file:/path/to/../file. To the extent practical, implementations should
attempt to resolve these differences before deciding if a particular
library URI has already been imported. [
https://spec.xproc.org/master/head/xproc/#p.import]

This suggests to me that the necessary operation is difficult to support in
a standard or testable way.

Is this so? I have made an XPath function that will perform the operation
AFAIK ... but I might not understand the full problem. It accounts for '.'
and '..' steps -- are there more complications?

What I would most like to know is whether creating such a function was
unnecessary, since there is already a simple way to do a fairly 'ordinary'
thing. I'm also wondering what makes this hard?

Thanks!
Wendell





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