[development] Why is the Drupal File System relative to website root and not relative to admin/settings/file-system path?

[Luc Stroobant]

Clemens Tolboom wrote:
> Having a development test acceptance and production environment it's a
> drag when moving the production database and files to an acceptance or
> development environment.
> 
> One has to update the files database table and more tables or do
> trickery with symlinks to get the site running clean.
> 
> If we could make the filepath in the files table relative to
> the /admin/settings/file-system path the real files are relocatable
> without pain. Just do a db load and a rsync to get the files and change
> the dmin/settings/file-system path.
> 
> What do you think? Did I miss something important?

On *nix you can easily workaround this problem by creating your site 
directory as sites/sitename and adding the actual urls as symlinks

So you get something as

directory: mysite
link: www.mysite.com -> mysite
link: dev.mysite.com -> mysite

entries in the files table will always look like sites/mysite/files/file.ext
and are the same for dev and prod...

Luc