No longer able to delete directories in dired

[Henrik Enberg]

This bug report will be sent to the Free Software Foundation,
not to your local site managers!
Please write in English if possible, because the Emacs maintainers
usually do not have translators to read other languages for them.

Your bug report will be posted to the address@hidden mailing list.

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

I can no longer delete directories in dired (via dired-do-delete), I
just get the error  quoted below.  I suspect this has someting to do
with RMS change to dired.el on 2003-06-04.  Is this intended
behaviour?  I vaugle remember some discussions about directory
deleting.

I have the following related vars set in .emacs.el.

(setq dired-recursive-deletes 'top
      dired-no-confirm
      '(byte-compile chgrp chmod chown compress copy
                     delete hardlink load move print
                     shell symlink uncompress))

,---
| Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Cannot operate on `.' or `..'")
|   signal(error ("Cannot operate on `.' or `..'"))
|   error("Cannot operate on `.' or `..'")
|   dired-get-filename()
|   dired-do-delete(nil)
|   call-interactively(dired-do-delete)
`---


In GNU Emacs 21.3.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2003-06-06 on rocksteady
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: C
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: nil
  locale-coding-system: nil
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Recent input:
C-p C-p C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n 
a C-n C-n C-n D C-n <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> 
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> 
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <menu-bar> <options> 
<debug-on-error> C-p D C-x o C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n 
C-n C-n C-x o C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n 
C-SPC C-p C-p C-p C-p C-p C-p C-p C-p C-p C-p M-w C-x 
o C-x 1 C-c g J J 1 g n n <return> q q <return> g M-x 
M-p M-x M-p r e p o r t - e <tab> <return>

Recent messages:
Saving /home/henrik/.newsrc.eld...done
Reading directory /home/henrik/Software/...done
Omitting...
Omitted 2 lines.
Omitting...
(Nothing to omit)
next-history-element: Beginning of history; no preceding item
Quit
next-history-element: Beginning of history; no preceding item
Loading emacsbug...done