Re: Unexpected (bug-like) behavior in `git ls-remote` matching.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 9, 2023, 13:15 UTC
Message-ID: <Y+Tx3Z45SlMJqDfh@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq357gt5s9.fsf@gitster.g>

On Wed, Feb 08, 2023 at 09:40:06AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> > Likewise, something more elaborate like full-path globbing or even
> > regex matching would be possible, but would need to be activated by an
> > option.
> 
> True.  We should be able to do a bit better than just tail-matching
> with an option.
> 
> I would not recommend sending over regex as protocol capability the
> same way as ref-prefix works, unless we adopt something that can
> match linear-time like re2 and use it everywhere, as you can send a
> pattern that is deliberately made inefficient to inconvenience the
> other side.

Yeah, I should not even have mentioned regex. It was really meant as "if you really wanted to go wild, you could do something as crazy as regexes". But I agree that we would never want to pass regexes over the wire. If we want to make things more efficient, prefix-matching is the way. If we want to make things more ergonomic for the client-side user, then we should stick to globbing (which we already do, but we could do things like full-string globs rather than strict tail-matching).

But I would hold off on all of that until somebody has a concrete case that shows why their preferred matching scheme is useful.

-Peff