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.
Note that on Windows a remote with a path like /home/foo/bar
is interpreted by git as being some screwy relative path (relative to what
exactly seems ill-defined -- it seemed relative to C:\Program Files\Git\ in
my tests!) So no attempt has been made to handle such a path sanely, just not
to crash when encountering it.
Note that "C:\\foo" </> "/home/foo/bar" yields /home/foo/bar even though
that is not absolute! I don't know what to make of all this,
except that I will be very happy when this crock of **** vanishes from
the face of the earth.
