uiop parse-native-namestring portability?

[Robert Goldman]

On 1/7/16 Jan 7 -10:34 AM, Faré wrote:
> Good luck convincing 7 active implementations to agree on how to parse that.
> If you know the path is relative and you want portability,
> try uiop:parse-unix-namestring.
> But even then, things get ugly when you reach wildcard characters.

I guess I'm not sure I understand.  Why is it necessary to get the
active implementations to agree on how to parse this?  Isn't it an
alternative to interpret the substring "." using
*default-pathname-defaults* and ".." using *default-pathname-defaults*
and :relative :back?

I'm sure you understand this far better than I do, so perhaps there's
something that makes this a non-starter....

Best,
r