Could you please add this comment to your documentation? I understand that a real hardcore java developer does not read a documentation, he would rather run a decompiler on the ivy classes. As I'm not a hardcore developer, I try to read the documentation. And if I find it saying : "Pathes are always normalized. The path can be relative or absolute", and then I get an error on an absolute path I'm confused, try to find the error in my code, setup simple test case, try again, and then in the end I find a solution, something like Reguel stated above. That cost me three hours of my lifetime, simply because the documentation is wrong. And as I'm much older than you my lifetime is very precious to me. For that reason I am not very enthusiastic about the answer.