This allows the git repository to be moved while git-annex is running in
it, with fewer problems.
On Windows, this avoids some of the problems with the absurdly small
MAX_PATH of 260 bytes. In particular, git-annex repositories should
work in deeper/longer directory structures than before. See
http://git-annex.branchable.com/bugs/__34__git-annex:_direct:_1_failed__34___on_Windows/
There are several possible ways this change could break git-annex:
1. If it changes its working directory while it's running, that would
be Bad News. Good news everyone! git-annex never does so. It would also
break thread safety, so all such things were stomped out long ago.
2. parentDir "." -> "" which is not a valid path. I had to fix one
instace of this, and I should probably wipe all calls to parentDir out
of the git-annex code base; it was never a good idea.
3. Things like relPathDirToFile require absolute input paths,
and code assumes that the git repo path is absolute and passes it to it
as-is. In the case of relPathDirToFile, I converted it to not make
this assumption.
Currently, the test suite has 16 failures.
0980f3dae6 broke support for local remotes
from direct mode repos, because the relative path was taken to be from the
gitdir, rather than from the work tree.