This message was deleted.

I don't remember, but probably to be on the safe side. If it is not defined against what the path is resolved if it is relative, it might as well be resolved against the current user directory, just like if you use

File("some/relative/path")

, and any build doing that is buggy and flaky, because sometimes the user directory is the project directory, but often it is not. Maybe the paths you get through

layout...

are already absolute, but iirc that is not explicitly defined, so I went the extra safe path probably.