On Sat, Oct 26 2024, Ralph Seichter wrote:
> I made quite a hash of this, didn't I? I even quoted the manpage's URL
> in my original question, because that was naturally the first place I
> checked, but I missed the relevant paragraph:

No apology needed!

I just went to double-check the man page myself. I first read the
details of 'database.mail_root' and then 'database.path'. When I didn't
find the detail there, I also read the section below on 'DATABASE
LOCATION'.

I still hadn't found anything about relative paths, but since I had the
email from David telling me this was documented there, I went back and
searched (computationally, not visually) for "relative" and finally
found the sentence you found as well:

>   The available configuration items are described below. Non-absolute
>   paths are presumed relative to $HOME for items in section database.

It's in its own sentence before the details of any specific
configuration item.

So I did just demonstrate that it's an easy thing to miss. That's not a
short man page, and it will generally be used as a reference (looking
for details of one specific entry, not reading the entire page straight
through).

In spite of the redundancy, perhaps it would make sense to add:

	A non-absolute path is presumed relative to $HOME.

to the descriptions of each of:

	database.backup_dir
        database.hook_dir
        database.mail_root
        database.path

(And if someone does this, they should also check whether git.path
deserves the same treatment.)

-Carl
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