Smarty and open_basedir

Hi people, A user was having a problem with our application, Smarty was complaining about ot being able to write "%4386/%836823/foo.tpl.php" (Problem writing...) I debugged and found that the directories where not being created at _write_file by the _create_dirs_structure (or so..) function. Why? Because the hosting company had open_basedir configured to "." so Smarty wasn't finding a match. My questions are: a)Why does Smarty care about open_basedir isn't it a PHP-level problem? I mean if other PHP applications CAN create a file/dir why do we make Smarty fail? Our user was puzzled because all the permissions where ok and he was able to create the file that Smarty couldn't from a stub php script. b)Is the "." value for open_basedir a right value? Why? c)If Smarty fails to create directories why are we getting the error when trying to create the file for the compiled template when it is obvious that the function will not work if the directories to-be-created weren't created? If this was already discussed my sincere apologies. Thanks for your answers!!