Michael Haggerty <mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On 09/07/2012 01:09 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote: >> Michael Haggerty <mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> >>> Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> >>> --- >> >> I think I asked why this matters (iow, why it is the right thing to >> do to reject an empty string, instead of treating it as "the current >> directory") in the previous round. I would have expected to find >> the answer be above the S-o-b line here. > > The reasons that the change is desirable: > > 1. The empty string is not a legitimate path according to POSIX; e.g., > see Linux's path_resolution(7): > > Empty pathname > In the original UNIX, the empty pathname referred to the current > directory. Nowadays POSIX decrees that an empty pathname > must not be resolved successfully. Linux returns ENOENT in this > case. > > Accordingly, comparable standard functions like realpath(3) reject the > empty string. > > 2. The functions did not handle the empty path consistently with the way > they handled other paths (namely, the return value contained a trailing > slash). > > 3. This unusual behavior was undocumented. > > The above points let me to the conclusion that the anomalous handling of > the empty string was a bug in the implementation rather than an intended > behavior. Moreover, a quick check of callers didn't turn up any that > seemed to rely on the strange behavior. > > Do you want a re-roll with this verbiage added to the commit messages of > the two relevant commits? What the function used to do does not really matter when we are trying to see if the behaviour of the new implementation makes sense, even though it is a good supporting argument to help us judge that this change will not cause regressions to existing callers. A two sentence paragraph, with "realpath(3) from POSIX.1 rejects an empty string as input" as the primary justification, with "no existing callers passes an empty string and expects to get the current directory" as a supporting argument, should suffice, I would think. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html