From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:22:05 GMT
Subject: Re: [BUG] gitattribute macro expansion oddity
Message-ID: <7v1ur7bhhe.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120110070300.GA17086@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> Bisection points to ec775c4 (attr: Expand macros immediately when
> encountered., 2010-04-06), but it's too late for me to dig further
> tonight. Cc'ing Junio as the author of the attr code and Henrik as the
> author of ec775c4.

Thanks for getting the ball rolling.

Regardless of this unrelated regression, after looking at what ec775c4
wanted to do again, I am very much tempted to just revert it.

It aimed to take these three

        *       ident
        foo     mybin
        bar     mybin ident

and wanted to omit 'ident' from "foo" when there is this macro definition
elsewhere:

	[attr] mybin binary -ident

But the real point of the macro was that the users do not have to know
their internals, iow, if you explicitly specify a pattern that overrides
the contents of the macro, that explicit pattern should win. When deciding
the value of "ident" attribute for path "foo", "* ident" is stronger than
"foo mybin" (the latter of which does not say anything about 'ident'
explicitly).