git archive without path

Hi!

I have never run "git archive" inside of a subdirectory but somehow I have always assumed that it creates an archive containing all files in it regardless the current directory. In fact, the git-archive man page says so:

path
    If one or more paths are specified, include only these in the
    archive, otherwise include all files and subdirectories.

But it turned out that "git archive" works as "git archive .", i.e. adds files starting with the current directory. Is any rational for this behavior? It smells to me like a bug rather than a feature. I cannot imagine wanting to create archive containing just part of the whole repository just because he happened to be in that directory, and documentation clearly says that all files should be added unless one or more paths are specified.

Dmitry