Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Richard Hansen <hansenr@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> On 2017-01-10 01:58, Jeff King wrote: >> ... >>> What happens in a bare repository? >>> >>> I'm guessing it's relative to the top-level of the repository, >> >> I just tried it out and it's relative to $PWD. > > That is understandable. When the user says > > $ cmd -O $file > > with any option -O that takes a filename, it is most natural if we > used $PWD/$file when $file is not absolute path. Ahh, ignore me in the above. The discussion is about the configuration variable, and I agree that being relative to GIT_DIR would have made more sense. In fact taking it as relative to PWD does not make any sense. We should have been a lot more careful when we added 6d8940b562 ("diff: add diff.orderfile configuration variable", 2013-12-18), but it is too late to complain now. A related tangent. I wonder if anything that uses git_config_pathname() should be relative to GIT_DIR when it is not absolute.