On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Matthew Brush <mbrush@codebrainz.ca> wrote:

Nobody who works with a document-editing tool reads the titlebar on a
regular basis.

Nobody?

Not on a regular basis -i know what document i'm supposed to be editing and i don't double-check. i look at the tab name, but that's just the basename.

Or you could just have your project file in /usr/src and point to the project base directory of /usr/src/linux where the current tree will/should always be symlinked to.

Symlinks typically get resolved to full paths by applications, making a symlink useless for this case. (i have not tried whether geany resolves them, but assume that it must for portability reasons).

any benefit or any safety against path-related errors. Not only that,
but it challenges common conventions (unsuccessfully, it turns out).

The benefit is that you don't have it in VCS, so when you checkout the code somewhere else, you don't have John Coder's IDE-specific project file in the tree pointing to files stored god knows where :)

i don't agree that this perceived benefit outweighs the problems caused by the inconsistency vis-a-vis common conventions. Show us _one_ non-geany IDE which uses absolute paths in the project file names. In the past hour i've been digging around my system looking for project files for a couple apps on my system (not IDEs), and not one of them uses absolute paths.

I can't think of a single project's source tree I've checked out where the developers store their personal editor/IDE preferences in the project's source tree, at least not that I've noticed.

Correct - but many of them have a single project file which the developers can use (e.g. maven build files which can be used developer-side to create IDE-specific project files). Scons and qmake also come to mind. And _those_ most certainly _do not_ use absolute paths because that makes them useless for cross-machine (or even 2x on one machine) purposes.

Still, I don't think it would qualify as "common convention", except maybe with VisualStudio projects/solutions.

Like it or not, VisualStudio _is_ the common convention. i don't use it (haven't used a Windows desktop since last millennium), but many, many people do. Others which come to mind: Qmake, Maven, and Jakarta Ant (all used as the basis for several IDE-dependent project-file generators and none of which requires absolute paths).