On Mon, Oct 28 2024, Ralph Seichter wrote:

> * Carl Worth:
>
>> No apology needed!
>
> Thank you all who commented and were understanding. You made me feel
> less foolish.
>
>> In spite of the redundancy, perhaps it would make sense to add:
>> A non-absolute path is presumed relative to $HOME. [...]

There is certain "format" in those entries in notmuch config *manual*
pages. I think having the line

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

separately works there (before these 'History:' and 'Default:' lines
(and that could look pretty good).

Maintenance burden is minimal there (should one ever need to edit
these lines, those are in close proximity to each other and grep(1)
finds all entries quickly).

>
> Good idea. That text, or perhaps the equivalent of a
>
>   <a href="#paths">see: paths</a>
>
> link pointing to the existing paragraph containing the detailed
> explanation of absolute versus relative paths? Like you mentioned, I
> jumped into the manpage searching for database.path specifics, including
> DATABASE LOCATION. Scrolling upwards to an unmarked paragraph did not
> occur to me at the time.

That could work in html versions of the documents.

>
> By the way, it is certainly not a technical requirement, but supporting
> the "~" prefix as an alias for $HOME would be an idiomatic way to permit
> users to explicitly mark paths as relative to their home directory.
> Interpreting the absence of a "/" prefix obviously works fine from a
> technical standpoint, but added "~" support would enhance readability,
> I think.

One could make ~/ work there (which would be nice -- and patches tolerated,
says an old saying), that is just more work :D

>
> -Ralph

Tomi
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