Re: [PATCH 2/2] diff: document the pattern format for diff.orderFile

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 11, 2017, 21:06 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq7f61nw5u.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <2fb4296d-f084-4a76-44f3-7dc7d7cca7b1@google.com>

Richard Hansen <hansenr@google.com> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

>> Back then we didn't even have wildmatch(), and used fnmatch()
>> instead, so forcing FNM_PATHNAME would have meant that people
>> wouldn't be able to say "foo*bar" to match "foo/other/bar"; with
>> wildmatch, "foo**bar" lets you defeat WM_PATHNAME so having
>> WM_PATHNAME always in effect is less of an issue, but with
>> fnmatch(), having FNM_PATHNAME always in effect has a lot of
>> downside.
>
> Ah, that makes sense.
>>
>> I'd expect that orderfile people have today will be broken and
>> require tweaking if you switched WM_PATHNAME on.
>
> OK, so we don't want to turn on WM_PATHNAME unless we do it for a new
> major version.

I do agree with you that if we were starting Git from scratch, or at least if we were adding diff.orderfile feature today, we would have used wildmatch(WM_PATHNAME) for this matching. We would also have used the same parser as used to read the exclude files (and when we see negative matching entries in the parsed result, either errored out or ignored them with warning). That kind of change unfortunately would require a major version bump, I am afraid.