git: Browsers don't support sending absolute file paths

[jyn514]

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/15201258. I wasted far too much time trying to get around this. The closest you can get is uploading the entire directory structure, which is useless for our purposes.

I guess we could have users type the file path into an upload box, but that's pretty hacky.

[jyn514]

Electron is going to be the easiest way around this, especially since we're running everything locally. We can hate ourselves for using backend JavaScript later.

Relevant FAQ

[jyn514]

Think we decided to avoid electron and just have people copy/paste the filename. @hdamron17 want to confirm with you before I close.

[hdamron17]

I’m confused where this is necessary. Are you talking about our former idea to not require copying the directory into our structure?

[jyn514]

So currently we require the directory to be in a zip file, and then that zip file has to have a git directory inside. This is silly and redundant. My idea was to have only the path to a directory, cache some metadata, and then generate everything else dynamically with git. There's no unzipping and all version management is done by git.

This issue was opened because you can't do that in a web browser; the sandbox will allow uploading files but not selecting file paths in a nice GUI. My comment above was saying we can have users copy/paste the absolute path to the directory.

I'm not sure what you're asking or what you mean by structure. If you mean avoid uploading a directory that's already on disk, then yes, that's what I mean.

[hdamron17]

I’ll look into it at some point but I think that’s not a huge priority since the project works well without it, it’s just an inconvenience.