Re: dired not bold enough to move directories

[John Paul Wallington <jpw@gnu.org>]

Luc Teirlinck wrote:

>      >  Well, gosh, if I can move a directory like this,
>      >    $ cd /var/tmp
>      >    $ mv affordablehost_logs ~/tmp
>      >
>      >  then why can't I remame it with R in dired?
>  
>      Because they are on separate partitions.
>      dired should behave like mv in such a case.
>  
>  I understand both above lines, but it is not immediately obvious to
>  me what your conclusion is.  It seems to me that you agree with
>  Dan, because (from version `4.0' of the fileutils onward) mv no
>  longer cares about partitions.  (Do I understand this correctly?)

Yup.

>  I personally agree with Dan (and you?) too, unless there would be
>  some good reason for dired to behave differently from mv in this
>  case.  (I can not think of any, but that does, of course, not mean
>  that there is none.)

Presently Frename_file calls rename or link (and unlink) then does:

      if (errno == EXDEV)
	{
	  Fcopy_file (file, newname,
		      /* We have already prompted if it was an integer,
			 so don't have copy-file prompt again.  */
		      NILP (ok_if_already_exists) ? Qnil : Qt, Qt);
	  Fdelete_file (file);
	}

which deals with renaming files across file systems.  Maybe it should
recursively copy directories too?  If not, then dired could handle it
in lisp instead.