Re: support comma-separated fetch specs list?

From: ryenus <ryenus@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 7, 2020, 10:11 UTC
Message-ID: <CAKkAvawVbyTPxDFQMEJMh+dzgQ_C0PXtbQKMo8xMNjgL_buGng@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq1rh9ptka.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On Wed, 4 Nov 2020 at 13:41, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 24 quoted lines

>
> ryenus <ryenus@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > It's nice to have negative ref spec support with 2.29 release, so now
> > we can have
> >
> > ```
> > [remote "origin"]
> >   fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
> >   fetch = ^refs/heads/gh-pages
> > ```
> >
> > What about having all the fetch specs put together in one comma-separated list?
> > Like this:
> >
> > ```
> > [remote "origin"]
> >   fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*,^refs/heads/gh-pages
> > ```
>
> I thought comma was a valid character that you can have in refnames,
> so no, I do not think it would fly without breaking existing users.
>
> What problem are you trying to solve?

I guess the problem is mainly about intuition? Since comma-separated lists are everywhere.

Personally I never thought about using comma in refnames, or even knew it's allowed.

Well, now I know because, after skimming through the 2.29 release notes, I tried out the negative refspec feature in a repo where I'd like to exclude the gh-pages branch. But somehow I appended a comma and the negative refspec to the existing fetch line, and expected it to work, then, oops, I got dozens of those refnames with commas, and had to go inside the .git dir and managed the clean up all the mess. And that's for sure and nice and hard lesson :-)

Maybe the cause is also my ignorance or lack of carefulness to read the docs, but searching for "comma separated list" in Git manual would return hundreds of results: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22comma+separated%22+list+site%3Agit-scm.com

So I guess it's fair to expect it to work in the fetch spec as well?