From: Junio C Hamano Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2012 06:59:48 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 04/10] attr: more matching optimizations from .gitignore Message-ID: <7v4nm8rspn.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy writes: > On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 12:36 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: >>> Or the user might think "path/ attr1" sets attr1 for all files under >>> "path/" because it does not make sense to attach attributes to a >>> directory in git. >> >> ... >> >> We may not have a need to assign a real attribute to a directory >> right now, because nothing in Git asks for an attribute for a >> directory. But that does not necessarily mean we would never need a >> way to give an attribute to a directory but not to its contents. > > Exactly why we should not make "path/ attr" no-op. If we want to make > it meaningful some day in future, I don't think we want those no-ops > lay around and suddenly cause changes in behavior with a new version > of git. I do not think you understood. "path/ attr" is a no-op from the point of view of the *users* of the current versions of Git. It is perfectly fine to accept and apply attr to "path/"; no codepath in Git should be asking about path/ anyway, so it ends up to be a no-op. You shouldn't be erroring out at the syntactic level, i.e. when these lines are parsed.