Re: [PATCH] attr: support quoting pathname patterns in C style

From: Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
Date: Nov 5, 2010, 21:46 UTC
Message-ID: <15C4C111-824D-4657-B034-A1BE1DAD50D4@sb.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vvd4bu2pl.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Nov 5, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Full pattern must be quoted. So 'pat"t"ern attr' will give exactly
>> 'pat"t"ern', not 'pattern'. Also clarify that leading whitespaces are
>> not part of the pattern and document comment syntax.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
>> ---
>> Obvious regression: patterns that begin with double quote will
>> now work differently.
> 
> I'm really hesitant to pursue this route and break people's existing
> setups, especially if the only benefit this patch tries to achieve is to
> allow somebody to say:
> 
>    "Program Files/*.txt" ...some attr...
> 
> It is not worth the effort, risk and headache, especially because people
> with such paths are probably already using
> 
>    Program?Files/*.txt	...some attr..
> 
> to match them.

Would this actually break any existing setups? The only ones that are affected are ones beginning with ", which I imagine would be rather rare. I personally am in favor of having an unambiguous way to encode whitespace into the pattern. Having to use ? has always struck me as being, well, not very good, especially if you have 2 files that only differ at that character (e.g. file.1 and "file 1").

-Kevin Ballard