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

From: Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
Date: Nov 8, 2010, 21:56 UTC
Message-ID: <626BD1B6-4DDF-457F-B430-F15C891710E2@sb.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v8w13r756.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Nov 8, 2010, at 10:40 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:
> 
>> Would this actually break any existing setups? The only ones that are affected
>> are ones beginning with ", which I imagine would be rather rare.
> 
> No regression policy means just that.  We try not to break "rather rare"
> people, only to add support for different kinds of "rather rare" setups,
> especially when the latter have working workarounds.

I'm still not convinced that the workaround is appropriate. If I have a file named "file 1" that needs special attributes, then it is impossible to leave those attributes unspecified for, e.g. "file.1". I'd have to set them on "file 1" and then immediately unset them for "file.1". And as unspecified behaves differently than unset, this can be a problem. Especially because if I add any other files in the future that match "file?1" I have to remember to go through gitattributes and re-set all of the ones already specified to something appropriate for this file.

Sure, this is probably a rare case, but so is filenames beginning with a ".

Basically what I'm trying to say is, we already break one particular "rather rare" setup. I would love to come up with a solution that supports both setups, but I don't know if one exists outside of using a config variable to control whether git attribute patterns support quoting (a solution I am not particularly fond of for this case).

-Kevin Ballard