Standardize on "internal path" instead of "Drupal path" or "system path"

I've identified more of these. I've added them to greggles' patch.

fixed a rejected hunk and rerolled!

needed a reroll.
it's actually a documentation issue.

This applies cleanly, doesn't break anything (I tried a clean install with the patch applied and various administrative pages), and helps us to more consistency. The issue linked above (especially comments around #9 - http://drupal.org/node/87777#comment-454831 ) gives enough background.

I don't agree 'system path' makes it better at all. What system? File system? Why not standardize on "Drupal path"? Honestly all of "Drupal path" (= the path to Drupal on the file system?), "internal path" (internal to what?) and "system path" (= path on the file system?) feels possibly ambiguous to me. Anyway, I don't think standardizing on "system path" gets us forward, it sounds too external to Drupal.

It's fair to say that "system path" can be ambiguous, but there seem to be no better wording, and it is already used in most of the UI.

I think the current inconsistent situation is more ambiguous than anything. Is it less ambiguous to have other expression such as "internal path" and "Drupal path" to actually talk about the same thing as "system path"? Once a new user figures out what "system path" means, he then have to figure out what "internal path" and "Drupal path" are. Intuitively, he would not think that all these term refer to the same thing.
Let "system path" be part of the Drupal learning curve, and let's keep the UI consistent.

To me, 'internal path' sounds like much better if we'd like to avoid using Drupal in the name. As said, 'system path' sounds external to Drupal IMHO.

currently, "internal path" is only used twice: in the schema of statistics module, and in menu.admin.inc.
If there is support for "internal path", I can roll a patch. Let's get more opinions first.

there isn't much time left to decide on that if the rc1 is to be released in the next few days...

To quote Gábor from http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2007-December/027977.html: "RC1 is string freeze, so whatever needs modifications in the strings is generally postponed to Drupal 7."

FWIW, my vote is for "Drupal path". "Drupal path" clearly states that it's the path which Drupal recognises - it doesn't have anything to do with the file system, the web server, PHP's path, $PATH, or any other such thing "outside" Drupal. Also, any string mentioning these paths should be admin-centric, and there shouldn't be a need to hide the "Drupal factor" from such fellows, IMHO. (And if there really is a need to hide this, there are plenty of options of overriding strings through various means.)

But +1 to standardising on one term for one "idea".

see also : #98905: Remove the word 'Drupal' from interface

The attached patch changes "Drupal path", "system path", and friends to a hopefully-consistent "internal path", as Gábor suggested in #8.

This standardizes an important piece of terminology, and removes an instance where we refer to "Drupal" inside the interface (which may not be ideal for white-label applications).

I am hopeful that I got most of them, including references in code comments, but obviously could have easily missed some. This patch should handle those instances revealed by a grep for "system path" and "Drupal path" , however.

found 4 more instances to be fixed. later we might also want to standardize on path vs URL, but let's not hijack this thread for now.

updating title

internal path should be used for user facing stuff, drupal path... request path, system path and internal path should be used in the documentation where appropriate.

internal path is a path pointing to a destination (node, etc...) within the site.
request path can be used for RPC etc.

I disagree with #19 first statement. Here we purposely check whether it's an alias in which case we set $_GET['q'] to the internal path. See drupal_init_path() and drupal_get_normal_path(): "Given a path alias, return the internal path it represents."
The second fix in #19 makes sense. I updated the patch. The patch also adds one fix 'normal path' -> 'internal path'.

By the way, 'normal path' was never suggested before. It might make sense to consider it in the discussion.

user display:
relative paths will be used for your website's internal links.
absolute paths will be used for your website's external links.

internal is the opposite of external, therefor, i still say, internal links have internal paths.

HOWEVER!!!
to make a difference beween the requested path (news/bully) and the system path (node/30), we should document it likewise.

Therefor, i suggest:
user facing (consistently):
- internal path: will be displayed to the user when talking about paths for internal links(e.g. menu system), the opposite of an external url.
documentation (detailed)
- request path: the actual requested path, for example, news/bully, is possibly an url-alias, used for example on a page load.
- internal path: used in for example the menu system, similar to request path, but not for the actual requested page, but for other pages
- system path: the actual system path, for example node/30, never an url alias.

comments are welcome.

Still a valid issue.

With 12 years of inactivity wonder if this is still a valid feature request.

Just following up if still a valid task, if no follow up in 3 months going to close out. Thanks

Wanted to bump 1 more time before closing.