🚀 go-pugleaf

(going back to the trailing slash discussion here)

    Most importantly, don't assume what people "want" in this environment,
    [the hurd, that is]

I don't want to assume any such thing!

    Most important is to make everything *possible* and then *convenient*.

I completely agree.

    the functionality I'm building
    in to the operating system be made available to users using ordinary
    shell utilities.

Fine.  But I don't want the existing convenience of mv to go away!  It
is very convenient for me, and I think others (although doubtless not
everyone), that
  (1) completion routines append / when they see a directory
  (2) that the utilities therefore ignore trailing slashes on directories

I'm probably just being dense, but I still don't see why this is such a
bad thing.

Your new file&directory nodes are not directories.  So the above doesn't
apply, it seems to me.  It would inappropriate for the completion
routines to append a / in the first place.

For that matter, what should ls -F report for these nodes (what does
stat return on them?)?  Perhaps a new trailing symbol should be invented
-- `:', maybe?  Then completion routines can append that new symbol,
the file utilities can be made to understand it, and everyone will be
happy.

Alternatively, I suppose a new symbol isn't really necessary.  The
completion routines could just not append anything, and the user can put
in a slash if desired.

But this is just speculation -- working out how these new nodes work
most conveniently is something we probably cannot do without actually
having them around to play with.