From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:04:06 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 6/6] t3001: note about expected "**" behavior
Message-ID: <7vobkiyuzt.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1349336392-1772-7-git-send-email-pclouds@gmail.com>

Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

> "**" currently matches any characters including slashes. It's probably
> too powerful. A more sensible definition may be match any characters
> that the but the whole match must be wrapped by slashes. So "**" can
> match none, "/", "/aaa/", "/aa/bb/" and so on but not "aa/bb".

I do not think this is something we want to retroactively change
after releasing it to the public, especially when we _know_ it is a
problem from the get-go (unlike the case we did not notice it had a
problem, release it to the public and then realize it and have to
scramble to devise a fix to bring more sanity in a backward
compatible way).

We must either declare that "**" that matches any characters is the
sane semantics and promise we will never change it, or have "**"
that matches \(/[^/]*\)*/ (sorry for a line noise^W^W^Wregexp) from
the beginning.