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

[andrew morton]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Ashraf Amayreh<mistknight at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't really understand why the files are not just stored relative to the
> files folder rather than the site root.
>
> That way, changing the location of the files folder would only entail
> changing the file path inside the administration.
>
> When retrieving file paths the function doing that could simply call
> file_directory_path() and append the filepath from the database. Isn't this
> how it should standardly be dealt with, or did I miss something?

Not to pick on you specifically, but if you'd read through the issue
that ufuk linked to in the very first reply to this thread
(http://drupal.org/node/366464) you'll find plenty of discussion about
the complications that prevent this from being such a "simple" change.

Can we please move this discussion over to the issue queue?

andrew