Subject: Re: [PATCH v0] sha1_name: grok <revision>:./<relative-path>

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:50:34 -0800

"Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy" <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Note that this patch does not handle "../", and neither do I plan to.
>
> Junio's rc1 announcement got me to read this. It would be indeed
> useful as I usually work in deep subdirs. However, from my user
> perspective, the right approach is to make <treeish>:path always be
> relative to current directory. If you want absolute path, use
> <treeish>:/path. More intuitive but it breaks current behavior.

I do not know if you followed the discussion thread, but the
<treeish>:relative-path has been shown to be broken semantics,
so even if it may be "intuitive", it is intuitive only to people
who do not understand the brokenness.  Please read the one that
Dscho talks about windows drive letter and Linus agrees that is
a good analogy.

It might be possible to do <commit>:relative and apply that only
to direct user input, but I do not think it is worth the
compatibility and complexity hassle.