[development] Impasse: Links to <front> are not marked active

[Barry Jaspan]

Links created with l() to the special path '<front>' are not marked
with the CSS class "active" as they should be.  The issue
http://drupal.org/node/78487 discusses the problem and has a working
patch.  Unfortunatey, we have an impasse on the fix.  Let's not ship
D6 with this ridiculous little bug still alive.

The patch is not committed because drumm said (#10): "Any code which
passes '<front>' to l() is buggy. We should be fixing the root
problems, not symptoms."

I replied (#11): "function url() is also written to assume that
<front> may be passed. From common.inc:1.611 line 1183:

  // The special path '<front>' links to the default front page.
  if (!empty($path) && $path != '<front>') {

In my case, I've added <front> to the primary links menu. I could
submit a patch to menu_item_link() to replace <front> with '' before
passing it to l(), but I'd suggest that would constitute fixing a
symptom, not the root problem. We'd basically have to fix every
invocation of l() because the API has specified for a while that you
can pass <front> and it will work so we don't necessarily know
everywhere it might occur."


So, if fixing l() as in the patch is wrong, can someone suggest the
correct fix?

Thanks,

Barry