Re: [PATCH] Use nonrelative paths instead of absolute paths for cloned repositories

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

>> In the longer term, we would inevitably face "when should one use 
>> nonrelative and when should one use absolute?" and we would eventually 
>> have to answer it.  It may turn out that many current users of 
>> "absolute" are better off using "nonrelative", but I suspect we won't 
>> get rid of "absolute" completely, because one of the reasons it avoids 
>> symlinks at great lengths is so that it can check the containment 
>> relationships between paths reliably (e.g. "is this path outside the 
>> repository, in which case we should refuse to add it to the index, and 
>> we use --no-index without being asked when running "diff"").
>> 
>> But using "absolute" for containment comparison is one thing.  Storing 
>> the result of "absolute" is quite another.
>
> The easy way would be to add an option to make_absolute_path(), say 
> "resolve_symlinks".

I am afraid that it does not solve anything.

Be they two separate functions, or a one function that has two different
semantics depending on an option, the API documentation needs to answer
the "when should I use one and when should I use the other" question.

And the hard part is figuring out which of the current "absolute" callers
need to be fixed in a way similar to how Daniel fixed git-clone, and which
of them stay the same.  Perhaps all of the "chdir then getpwd" patterns
need to be looked at and some of them need to be restructured to honor $PWD
better.  I dunno.