OK, then I misunderstood what you meant by "normalizing". But a question remains then: What is a use case for having equality modulo "normalise"? It throws together a few more paths which plain equality on strings would consider different, but it is still not semantic equality in the sense of "these 2 paths refer to the same dir/file". So unless there is a compelling use case (which I don't see), I don't see a point in always doing "normalise". Or do I miss something?