Re: [PATCH 0/6] Introduce pathspec struct

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 29, 2010, 04:26 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzkv1qinx.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinZ=dx1nBXTw0E=nLOmncsgNb7wv1-+ddWzPU+e@mail.gmail.com>

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

>>  $ git log --exclude "Doc*" master..pu -- '*.txt'
>>  $ git grep --exclude "t/" -e 'test .*-L' -- '*.sh'
>
> I was writing "but you would lose the ability to mix negative and
> positive pathspecs together, something like 'exclude Documentation
> except Documentation/technical'",...

I think that is way overengineered. We _could_ make the expressions arbitrarily complex and hard to use by using irregular syntax tricks, but let's not go there. Let's just keep things simple and usable instead.

 * Without pathspec, everything is included;
 * pathspecs will filter everything that do not match;
 * --exclude also filters what matches them from the remainder.

So...

> $ git log --exclude Documentation --exclude "!Documentation/technical"
> master..pu -- '*.txt'
>
> does not sound too twisted to understand (I hope).

...I would not vote for this.

> ... If David
> needs "git grep --exclude-dir" now, he should keep working on
> builtin/grep.c as he's doing now (maybe change --exclude-dir to
> --exclude).

That's not what I am saying.

Because --exclude-dir is a special case of --exclude, it would be an efficient solution _if_ we can externally keep the command line option compatible with GNU grep as a syntax sugar, and turn it into something else internally that can be passed to your "pathspec with negative" engine.

> ..., but his work on the
> command line interface _and tests_ won't be wasted.

Yup.