Re: checkout extra files

From: Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 4, 2012, 01:49 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8BDtV95QmWmJ8CEh06FUePOB7KY6nKPR1KCZ7DkMN_MNQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vsjayew50.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 2:36 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

>> It's confusing but I don't think there's much we can do about it.
>
> The user can, by telling the shell to expand '*' that does not match
> to nothing, though.

It works 99% the time, I don't think any users would bother setting that or studying the shell at that detail, until they are surprised.

Show 14 quoted lines

> Is there anything that is confusing in our documentation?  I am not
> looking for a change to the documentation that protects it from
> getting misunderstood by deliberately twisted interpretations (such
> a change would make the resulting text would harder to read), but I
> do want to make sure it is not prone to confusion even to a casual
> and careless reader.
>
> For this particular scenario, I do not see anything offhand that is
> unclear about the behaviour of Git in the documentation, even though
> as you pointed out, if the user is unaware that the shell passes
> globs unmodified when they do not match, it may lead to a confusion
> like this.  I certainly do not want to do a full "introduction to
> shell" in our documentation, but if adding a short sentence or two
> helps to avoid confusion like this, I do not strongly object to it.

Yeah, one or two sentences about two level expansion might help new users. I'll check that. Maybe in the pathspec definition, then split that part of out glossary-content.txt to be included in pathspec-using commands as a separate pathspec section. Too much?

-- 
Duy