Stefan Beller <sbeller@xxxxxxxxxx> 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.