Hi brian,

On Fri, 9 Oct 2020, brian m. carlson wrote:

There are a bunch of different situations in which one would like to
have an absolute and canonical or a relative path from Git.  In many of
these cases, these values are already available from git rev-parse, but
some values only come in one form or another.

Many operating systems, such as macOS, lack a built-in realpath command
that can canonicalize paths properly, and additionally some programming
languages, like Go, currently do as well.  It's therefore helpful for us
to provide a generic way to request that a path is fully canonicalized
before using it.  Since users may wish for a relative path, we can
provide one of those as well.

I am very much in favor of this patch series' goal. Windows also does not
_really_ have anything in the way of `realpath`. Besides, it would be good
to have a way to ask _Git_ what it's idea of the real path is (no
guessing!).

Thanks,
Dscho