Re: [PATCH v4 5/5] fetch: reduce duplicate in ref update status lines with placeholder

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 27, 2016, 05:42 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8Cq8Jp1yNWS-oBoZNTKqqsSZMM==Y3y1feXdutWSizo9w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cT=BAuAbEmS5G1v2yGNczA+-WvW0bBZz_hrLcYi0bpO4g@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 6:33 AM, Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 1:58 AM, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> wrote:
>> In the "remote -> local" line, if either ref is a substring of the
>> other, the common part in the other string is replaced with "$". For
>> example
>>
>>     abc                -> origin/abc
>>     refs/pull/123/head -> pull/123
>>
>> become
>>
>>     abc         -> origin/$
>>     refs/$/head -> pull/123
>
> Bikeshedding...
>
> I think I recall in an earlier iteration that you asked for opinions
> about '$', but don't recall if there were responses. Have you
> considered '*' rather than '$'?

I did. But I remembered that * is used as wildcard in refspec, which is specified on both sides, e.g. refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/foo/* and wondered if it could cause a little confusion when the user sees '*' only on one side here. But I have no strong opinion on '$' or '*' or any other character. So if nobody says anything else, the next re-roll will go with '*'.

> In my brain, at least, '$' is associated so strongly with regex that
> "origin/$" is interpreted automatically as anchoring "origin/" at the
> end of string, and "refs/$/head" just feels weird.

On the other hand, '$' has been used as the variable expansion symbol in shell, tcl, perl and php (which are probably the same thing since I have a feeling all of them borrow '$' from one source, probably shell). But yeah, '$' at the end could remind people of regexp too.

> On the other hand, given the familiarity of shell globbing, "origin/*"
> and "refs/*/head" feel quite natural and intuitive.

-- 
Duy