Re: [RFC] The design of new pathspec features

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 29, 2013, 06:13 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8DsKFfGoPUt5b=3MuSmZ2z2Z5vJ20D_kqEowAUc8QTryA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vd2wotuxm.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> Have you considered if it may be helpful to have a :(literal) magic
> (or any magic in general) that applies only to the first N
> characters of the pathspec pattern?

Not user-driven. But the prefix part is :(literal)-applied. :(glob) is currently implemented this way, using nowildcard_len as you mentioned. :(icase) is more complicated and does not follow yet.

Show 15 quoted lines

> I personally think we do not need to support something like this:
>
>         prefix=$(git rev-parse --show-prefix)
>         n=${#prefix}
>         pathspec=":(literal-$n)$prefix$1"
>
> but other aspiring Porcelain script writers may disagree and would
> want to have it.  We can always solve it by giving them an easy and
> uniform way to get the glob-quoted version of prefix to solve this
> particular issue, i.e.
>
>         prefixq=$(git rev-parse --show-prefix-glob-quoted)
>         pathspec="$prefixq$1"
>
> but magic that applies only to a substring may have other uses.

Yeah, that simplifies things. Supporting applying magic over just parts of the pathspec pattern sounds complex. Just a small modification. That rev-parse needs to look at "$1" as well. If :(literal) is already specified, glob quoting will backfire. The user script can deal with that, but it's harder (e.g. parsing magic from scripts and deal with magic combination) than letting rev-parse does it.

I've done some form of this already, for supporting add--interactive. git-add prefixes the pathspec but keeps all the magic in place, before passing pathspec to add--interactive. But I missed the quoting point you mentioned above. I probably need de-quoting the prefix as well. Many optimizations stop short at the sign of any glob symbols, including backslash. This could be a new task for wildmatch.

-- 
Duy