I agree with the convenience of being able to give a common parent for reference paths. The difficulty is that Chutzpah runs in VS and out of VS so using the project file as the root is not a great option.

With the next Chutzpah release which I am pretty much done I am adding a settings file (chutzpah.json) and in a subsequent release I could add an option to make this the root of references when a reference starts with /.

What do you think of that or other options?

Yes the option with using the settings file could be useful if it's placed under project root.
The point is basicly to add support for easy refactoring in a large project, and also support tests in one vsproj with it's target files in another vsproj.

references (and even _references.js) at the moment is too complex to manage. (if you have 3000 tests and every test has reference targets using relative paths from their own folder to point at files in another project)

I was hoping you would see the benefit of having the configurable constants too.
But if the settings.json would be root, that would help to, if it supports /../myTargetProject/vm/viewmodel.js to point at another vs project?

Yes the settings.json would be useful, when placed under project root.
if I can use /../SomeVsProject/viewmodel.js to reference a script file in another visual studio project, that would cover the case with configurable constants too. It needs to be supported in both test files, and _references.js to cover all cases.

The point is basicly to add support for easy refactoring in a large project (1000+ tests) without using relative paths from the file containing the <reference> tag, and also support files in multiple projects.

Thank you.

I totally agree so here is a more detailed proposed solution.
You have a solution that looks like this:

\MySolution
   chutzpah.json
    \src
       code.cs (and others)
    \test
        test.js (and others)

In the chutzpah.json file there would be a variable you can set named:
MakeSettingsFileDirectoryReferenceRoot
which by default is false but when set to true would cause a reference like:
<reference path="/" /> to reference the directory the chutzpah.json file is in.

This would not change the relative path behavior so a path like
<reference path = "../" /> is still relative to that test file itself.

Then in test.js you could write a reference path like:
<reference path="/src/code.js" />
and this would correctly reference the code.js file.

Am I missing anything? Would this solution work for you?
Thoughts?

Sounds great. Just what we are looking for.
When can I expect this in a future release?
Thanks a bunch.

I checked in my proposed solution (with some slight setting parameter renaming). I will include this in my next release which I hope to wrap up this month.