From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:06:54 GMT
Subject: Re: top-level gitignore considered harmful
Message-ID: <7vvclnoydd.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120329211136.GA1112@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> [1] ... But we could do better in git, too. fnmatch
>     patterns need to be examined linearly because of wildcards. But
>     many patterns don't have wildcards, or the wildcards come much later
>     in the pattern. There's no reason we couldn't preprocess the
>     patterns into a data structure with fast lookup properties, grouped
>     by non-wildcard prefixes (so seeing "foo/bar/*.baz", we could build
>     a trie that lets us reject "other/directory" after only a
>     single-character match).

It sounds like a good project for somebody who has three months working on
full-time, especially if she can be helped with a good mentor.  The result
will reasonably be self-contained.