Re: Problem with git-gui and relative directories

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:
> > +if {$_prefix ne {}} {
> > +	regsub -all {[^/]+/} $_prefix ../ cdup
> 
> I don't like this approach.  It assumes too much about the file system
> and cleanliness of paths.  It does all of the following:
> 
> /somedir/ -> /../
> /somedir -> /somedir
> //server/somedir -> //../somedir
> /somedir//someother -> /..//someother

OK, well, uh.  Go read the manpage for `git-rev-parse` and focus
in particular on the `--show-prefix` option of that command.
Its output is what we are using here.  Its very well defined within
Git, and should have the same definition on all operating systems,
including MinGW.

And if the MinGW folks did something funny its only a translation
of / to \, in which case its easy enough for git-gui to make that
decision on its own based on what type of git it is running on.
 
> and so on.  It can't deal with directory symlinks properly.

Depends on your definition of properly.  Here git-gui does exactly
what the C programs in core Git do, which is counter to what the
shell scripts do.  And people prefer the C behavior of going up
through the real parents, ignoring the symlinks that were used to
get to the directory the user started git-gui within.

> And the
> approach does not scale to Windows and other systems with diverging
> path syntaxes at all.

Yes, it does.  Because the format of --show-prefix is defined.

> Isn't it possible to move to the workdir root for the purpose of
> interpreting workdir root relative filenames?

Because I have always disagreed with the GIT_WORK_TREE mess.
I think its insane to say "I'm here in A, my repository is over
there in B and my files are here in C... now go run status!".
But apparently its a use case.

I guess I could use `git rev-parse --show-cdup` and that would just
handle this case.  But that's YAFAE (Yet Another Fork And Exec).

-- 
Shawn.