Re: Why does git-grep appear to treat exclude pathspecs differently?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 5, 2025, 18:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20250805185703.GC1345110@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbjoxgd83.fsf@gitster.g>

On Sat, Aug 02, 2025 at 10:56:28PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> > So I wonder if we have painted ourselves into a compatibility corner a
> > bit, if we have two conflicting expectations. We might be better off
> > just teaching check_filename() to parse multiple of [^/!] and the
> > trailing colon. It's horrible and not great for maintainability, but
> > this syntax is not something that changes often.
> 
> Ah, OK.
> 
> So the idea is that when given _as_ a pathspec element (e.g., after
> an explicit "--" separator), we do want to interpret ":file.txt" as
> the same as "file.txt", but when dwimming to sift revs and pathspec
> elements apart, prefer to take it as a blob object name in the
> index?

Yeah, I think that is a good way of framing / justifying it; DWIM can be looser because it's inherently about heuristics.

I don't plan to do anything with this topic anytime soon, but maybe Ben wants to produce a patch in that direction.

-Peff

PS I'll be offline for a week or so starting tomorrow, so apologies for
   any discussions I leave hanging.