From: Junio C Hamano Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 06:47:19 GMT Subject: Re: git & patterns Message-ID: <7v62p79og8.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <4DD4B772.2050404@hupie.com> Ferry Huberts writes: > - usually patterns are just patterns, without specifying what kind > - when a pattern type is specified it most of the time is a glob pattern > - but sometimes it is called a shell pattern > - and a few cases speak of a wildcard pattern (I think) All these three are the same thing. I do not personally feel any strong need to change a lot of documentation to use only one of the terms, if that is what you are getting at. What I was wondering was perhaps we may need to document the general principle of using globs when matching names that are hierarchically grouped with slash-delimited components. The branch and tag namespaces are examples of such hiearchically grouped namespaces, and it is not a mere implementation detail as you seem to think. For jk/blame-line-porcelain and jk/diffstat-binary are both branch names, grouped by name initials of the author, and the globbing jk/* is a way to get to the group. With that grouping present, you cannot have a branch called "jk".