workspacedir doesn't actually support relative paths?

[Anrock]

Documentation states that workspacedir can be a relative path:

Because of this, the workspacedir directory is the only directory which is allowed to be declared as a relative path.

However setting workspacedir: ./workspace/ in ~/.config/buildstream.conf and then executing bst workspace list produces

$ bst workspace list
Error loading user configuration: workspacedir must be an absolute path

[kotborealis]

_context.py

            # Relative paths don't make sense in user configuration. The exception is
            # workspacedir where `.` is useful as it will be combined with the name
            # specified on the command line.
            if not os.path.isabs(path) and not (directory == "workspacedir" and path == "."):
                raise LoadError("{} must be an absolute path".format(directory), LoadErrorReason.INVALID_DATA)

So, in contrast with docs, parser allows workspacedir to be either absolute path or ..
The easiest fix is to update docs, but I think it would be useful to fully allow relative paths for it, to easily open workspaces in some directory inside current project, and not to spam them directly into the repo root.

[abderrahim]

There is an old issue about this: #191

[Anrock]

@abderrahim I've read the issue (and some linked subissues) and I understood that the intended way to use workspaces is to actually place them outside of bst project and even the default . is troublesome, is this correct?

[abderrahim]

No, the intent is to support relative paths to workspaces regardless of whether they're placed inside or outside of the project. The current implementation however only supports subdirectories of the project.

It would be possible to relax the check mentioned in #2171 (comment) to allow workspacedir to be set to any subdirectory, but making it support any relative path needs more work in buildstream.