Re: [PATCH] Some documentation...

From: David Greaves <david@dgreaves.com>
Date: Apr 20, 2005, 17:35 UTC
Message-ID: <426692D1.20304@dgreaves.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0504201321380.2630@cag.csail.mit.edu>

C. Scott Ananian wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, David Greaves wrote:
> 
>> In doing this I noticed a couple of points:
>> * update-cache won't accept ./file or fred/./file
> 
> 
> The comment in update-cache.c reads:
> /*
>  * We fundamentally don't like some paths: we don't want
>  * dot or dot-dot anywhere, and in fact, we don't even want
>  * any other dot-files (.git or anything else). They
>  * are hidden, for chist sake.
>  *
>  * Also, we don't want double slashes or slashes at the
>  * end that can make pathnames ambiguous.
>  */
> 
> It could be argued that './' is a special case... but at the moment this 
> is definitely a designed 'feature' not a 'bug'.

Indeed - I've been reading the code to document it as correctly as possible.

But I actually found this by running:

   find . -type f | xargs git add

for a new project - so I'd class it as user unfriendly... Yes, I know how to get round it :)

I have ensured that my next perl version of gitadd.pl (that I submitted to Petr) doesn't allow these files to be added - and it could even cleanse leading ./ and any /./ constructs.

So maybe it's left as documented behaviour and higher level tools must manage the data they feed to it...

I hope it's useful to raise these niggles now before changing them is too hard.

David