Re: git difftool does does not respect current working directory

From: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
Date: May 20, 2011, 04:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20110520044851.GD13582@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vwrhm3scl.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 09:31:54PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > We would have to change the way $GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF works so
> > that it preserves the current directory and constructs
> > paths relative to it.  Patches welcome :-)
> 
> I am afraild that would break a lot more than difftool.
> 
> If we really wanted to change the behaviour, the external diff interface
> needs to export the value of prefix (i.e. what the original subdirectory
> was), and the script that is spawned as $GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF (optionally
> optionally) take it into account, perhaps by cd'ing back to that
> subdirectory and possibly moving or renaming the temporary files to suit
> its needs (I think recently we also saw a request to rename the temporary
> files).
> 
> Or something like that.

Yup, yup. That's a lot of machinery for a relatively small gain. Simple is simple, simple is good. Thanks for outlining how someone could implement it, though.

I won't do it myself but if someone is motivated enough then your email at least gives an idea about how to go about doing it. git-difftool--helper could chdir to $prefix and diff each file with $(git rev-parse --show-cdup)/$path as the path since it may no longer be at the root.

This seems very messy so I don't really want to sound too encouraging about going down this route. I probably shouldn't have encouraged looking at the temporary files thing in the other thread either.

Thanks,

-- 
					David