This is necessary in order to be able to correctly translate between absolute and relative paths
deeper in the code - e.g. paths to SVG files used in marker or fill symbols.
Until now, relative paths were translated to absolute paths on the fly.
This is now changed - paths to files should be always absolute within QGIS objects - and paths
only get turned into relative when saving projects. When loading a project, relative paths
are translated to absolute paths immediately.
This should lower the overall confusion about relative/absolute paths within QGIS, and also
allow having different base directories for relative paths (e.g. QML or QPT files may use relative paths
to their directory - rather than to the project directory)
The order of the elements is irrelevant and duplicate elements are unwanted. It
is therefore a perfect candidate for a set instead of a list. This prevents
filtering for duplicates manually be replacing some filer codes with (more
performant) builtin methods of QSet.