Re: ag, **, and the GPL

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 19, 2014, 00:48 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8BYBKMqWiNQ=xFjS8s_6GCeoA+UZ-HQ_V1qnsvQG6jOKA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1416333456.27401.1.camel@leckie>

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:57 AM, David Turner <dturner@twopensource.com> wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 20:50 -0800, Matthew Kaniaris wrote:
>> The Silver Search (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher), is
>> a small, open source, cross platform searching utility written as a
>> replacement for ack.  One of the major benefits of Ag (and a source
>> for much of its speed) is that it obeys .gitignore.  However, Ag
>> currently treats gitignores as regexs which produces incorrect results
>> for e.g. **.  I'd like to add support to ag to obey the .gitignore
>> spec but I'm not keen on implementing yet another fnmatch clone.  Ag
>> is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 which to the best of
>> my understanding is incompatible with the GPLv2.  Would you grant me
>> permission to reuse wildmatch.c (and necessary includes) for use in
>> Ag?
>
> I already implemented this without using any git code at
> https://github.com/novalis/the_silver_searcher.  The patch was rejected
> because it slowed down ag slightly (or perhaps because it was overly
> complex).

Interesting. Do you have a direct link to that discussion (I don't know how to navigate that novalis link). Generally you (or ag) should avoid fnmatch/wildmatch whenever possible. Hitting those *match() _will_ slow things down (and git tries hard to avoid it). I had some optimizations on top of rsync wildmatch to handle "*" case better, but I don't think it'll make big difference in practice.

-- 
Duy