Re: [PATCH/alternative/raw and rough] setup.c: denote repo wide pathspecs by ':'

From: Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 1, 2011, 11:50 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinke05gcQbrDLSUoBUus5gnx+ci5830766d2Jqs@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4D6CD593.2090705@drmicha.warpmail.net>

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> wrote:

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> Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy venit, vidit, dixit 01.03.2011 12:13:
>> 2011/3/1 Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>:
>>> Introduce a leading ':' as the notation for repo-wide pathspecs.
>>>
>>> This is in line with our treeish:path notation which defaults to
>>> repowide paths.
>>>
>>> Heck: Even ':./path' works for pathspecs, and I have no clue why!
>>
>> If you are going to turn pathspecs into something more complex,
>> reserve room for future extension. I have negative pathspecs that can
>> utilize it.
>>
>> I take it, from now on people must refer file name ':foo' as './:foo'
>> with your patch?
>
> That is up for discussion, of course. When discussing a new approach for
> file mode dependent attributes, I was hoping to get through with
> symlink:path, and did not. But it was decided that something like
> :symlink:path would be good enough, in the sense of avoiding enough
> possible conflicts. That made me hope that :path would be, too.

Take me down. I'm going crazy now.

Another, less cryptic choice, is to make these special notations separate from true pathspecs. For example, instead of ":foo" we can say "--root foo". get_pathspec() and friends can be updated to remove --root and rewrite the next pathspec. Extensibility is obvious. Problems are plenty:

 - may be confused with command line options without "--" as separator
("-:" on the other hand is not, but looks weird)
 - '-' is not a reserved letter, the same as ':'
 - ...

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> (I have not checked for interaction of those two, which are in flight.)
>
> I would think that file names like ":foo" are problematic on msys
> already, so in a sense they are no-no already, and free to take as
> special notation.

Back to what I'm writing above, '-' may be chosen over ':' even without separation because UNIXers are trained that '-' is usually the beginning of something special, I suppose most of us would go with ./-blah for file names.

-- 
Duy