Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] handling alternates paths with colons

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2016 10:10:54 -0800

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 02:37:08PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:
>> 
>> > So here are patches that do that. It kicks in only when the first
>> > character of a path is a double-quote, and then expects the usual
>> > C-style quoting.
>> 
>> The quote being per delimited component is what makes this fifth
>> approach a huge win.  
>> 
>> All sane components on a list-valued environment are still honored
>> and an insane component that has either a colon in the middle or
>> begins with a double-quote gets quoted.  As long as nobody used a
>> path that begins with a double-quote as an element in such a
>> list-valued environment (and they cannot be, as using a non-absolute
>> path as an element does not make much sense), this will be safe, and
>> a path with a colon didn't work with Git unaware of the new quoting
>> rule anyway.  Nice.
>
> We do support non-absolute paths, both in alternates files and
> environment variables. It's a nice feature if you want to have a
> relocatable family of shared repositories. I'd imagine that most cases
> start with "../", though.

Yes.  I was only talking about the environment variable, as you can
tell from my mention of "colon" there.