Stefan Beller <[email protected]> writes:
>> In any case, I find it more disturbing that we somehow ended up with
>> a system where these three things are expected to behave differently:
>>
>> A - path/to/dir
>> B - path/to/dir/
>> C - path/to/dir/.
>>
>> Is that something we can fix?
>
> Well A, B are the same.
> C is "obviously" different, when it comes to counting slashes for relative
> path/url purposes, in the way that there are characters after the last slash
> and just by coincidence '.' refers to the directory itself, C behaving like
> 'path/to/dir/sub' seems right to me.
It doesn't look right to me at all. If you were contrasting
cd path/to/dir/sub && cd ..
cd path/to/dir/bus && cd ..
then I would understand, but why should these two
cd path/to/dir/. && cd ..
cd path/to/dir/sub && cd ..
behave the same?
> So how do you imagine this fix going forward?
> * Breaking existing users with /. at the end? by treating it the same as A,B
> * Do some check based on time/version of Git and cover the old data?
> * Forbid /. at the end from now on?
Where at the end-user facing level does this trailing "/." surface
and how does the difference appear to them? I think that is the
crucial question.
Unless there is some convincing argument why "." is not special
(i.e. counter-argument to the above "bus vs sub" and ". vs sub"
example), I would think "existing users with /." does not matter.
If they are "relying" on the behaviour, I would think it is not
because they find that behaviour intuitive, but only because they
learned to live with it. IOW, treating all of A/B/C the same way
would appear to them a strict bugfix, I would think.
It is totally a different matter if OUR code that consumes the
output from the submodule-helper --resolve-relative" internally is
confused and relies on "../. relative to path/to/dir/. is the same
as ../. relative to path/to/dir/sub" for whatever reason. Without
fixing that, I would not surprised if fixing things to treat A/B/C
the same way would surface differences in the end-user observable
behaviour in a negative way.
