Re: relative_path() seems overly complicated and buggy

Tom Lane wrote:
> There's at least one bug in path.c's relative_path(): it will think
> "/foo/a/b" is equal to "/foo/ab" because it skips directory separators
> independently in the two strings. The code is sufficiently complex that
> I have little faith in it not having any other bugs, either.
>
> I believe that it's unnecessary for relative_path to be so tense
> about trying to implement platform-weirdness-aware comparison of paths.
> It is not called on arbitrary paths, but only on the compiled-in
> paths that were generated by configure. Therefore it is reasonable
> to assume that the common prefix we are trying to identify is spelled
> exactly the same in both paths.
>
> What I'd like to do is simplify it to just check for exact equality
> up through the last directory separator in bin_path. Any objections?

If you can simplify it, feel free. I found that code much more complex
than I liked but couldn't simplify it. Originally I thought that would
be used in more generic places but that hasn't happened.

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