Re: [PATCH] Make Git accept absolute path names for files within the work tree

On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 07:59:43AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

I do remember the hassles I went through with get_relative_cwd() until I 
broke down and used chdir() two times (ugly).

It really is a pretty heavy and complex operation in UNIX in general (and 
open to various races too), which is why I'd generally suggest avoiding it 
if you at all can.

It is more expensive, though we will be doing it once per user-supplied
pathspec, so I don't know that it will actually have an impact.

I am concerned that not supporting symlinks will make this feature
unusably annoying for some users. I used to have a home directory that
had a symlink in it, and I frequently ran into these sorts of path
comparison issues ($HOME was /home/peff, so typing ~/repo/file pointed
there, but /home was a symlink to /mnt/data/home, so any routines that
normalize the cwd used /mnt/data/home/repo, and the two never matched
up).

Hrm. Looks like somebody has already helpfully implemented
make_absolute_path, so it would just require calling that on each
argument. Something like this on top of Robin's patch:

diff --git a/setup.c b/setup.c
index 4ee8024..e76c83c 100644
--- a/setup.c
+++ b/setup.c

@@ -58,7 +58,8 @@ const char *prefix_path(const char *prefix, int len, const char *path)
 {
 	const char *orig = path;
 	if (is_absolute_path(path))
-		path = strip_work_tree_path(prefix, len, path);
+		path = strip_work_tree_path(prefix, len,
+				xstrdup(make_absolute_path(path)));
 
 	for (;;) {
 		char c;

-Peff