Re: [PATCH] gitignore: warn about pointless syntax
- From
- Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
- Date
- Jan 10, 2012, 07:01 UTC
- Message-ID
- <alpine.LNX.2.01.1201100744340.17336@frira.zrqbmnf.qr>
- In-Reply-To
- <7vd3asayfx.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
On Tuesday 2012-01-10 07:01, Junio C Hamano wrote:
Show 11 quoted lines
>>>That being said, if this is such a commonly-requested feature >> >>Was it actually requested, or did you mean "commonly attempted use"? >>As I see it, foo/**/*.o for example is equal to placing "*.o" in >>foo/.gitignore, so the feature is already implemented, just not >>through the syntax people falsely assume it is. > >You can either adjust the people, i.e. teach that their "false" assumption >is wrong and the feature they expect is available but not in a way that >they expect. Or you can adjust the tool to match their expectation. >[...]in real life, people are harder to train than tools[...]
Though, having one more way to do things leads to a certain mess at a later point, if such mess is not already present. I am thinking here of the precedent iptables option parser set by removing support for exclamation marks in odd positions, as it was redundant ("more than 1 way"), was only supported by ~45% of all options and had to be explicitly invoked at every callsite - so in fact was harder on users than git would be for **. There were a few mails by people who could not seem to read error messages, but overall, within 6-9 months, everything was quiet again. So, that's the empiric result of what teaching-the-tool would do.