Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] send-email: don't needlessly abs_path() the core.hooksPath

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 May 2021 10:03:47 +0900

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason  <[email-masked]> writes:

> In c8243933c74 (git-send-email: Respect core.hooksPath setting,
> 2021-03-23) we started supporting core.hooksPath in "send-email". It's
> been reported that on Windows[1] doing this by calling abs_path()
> results in different canonicalizations of the absolute path.

I see the author of that patch CC'ed; the change in question
explains why we switched from "the hooks directory immediately under
$repo->repo_path()" to "ask 'rev-parse --git-path hooks'", but it
does not say why we call abs_path() on the result.  I guess that is
because $repo->repo_path() has always been a result of applying the
abs_path() function to something, so it was to safeguard the callers
that expect an absolute path coming back from hooks_path?

And that makes this change dubious, especially as a band-aid for a
breakage immediately before the final release, doesn't it?  Are we
convinced that the callers are OK with seeing sometimes relative
paths?  Certainly the cases the tests J6t fixed are not negatively
affected, but is that sufficient?  To what directory is the
configuration variable supposed to be relative to, and are we sure
that the user will always invoke "git send-email" from that
directory?

Puzzled.