Re: recentf improvement

[Richard Stallman]

    `recentf-list' already contains absolute paths.

abbreviate-file-name does more than just make the file name absolute.
(expand-file-name does that.)  It also uses ~ when possible, and makes
other predefined abbreviations, to make a shorter absolute file name.

Note that `~/foo' is an absolute file name.
Just `foo' is a relative file name.
The names in file-name-history should be absolute;
the question is whether to convert them to shorter absolute forms.