Re: [RFC/PATCH] recognize pathspec magic without "--" disambiguation

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 28, 2017, 00:04 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqd1atc0eh.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20170527203937.hto7lwxfbjvl5f7o@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Yeah. That's a good reason not to use ":/" without a disambiguating "--"
> (which _does_ work, even without my series, because check_filename()
> does specific path-matching). At best, you pay for a complete useless
> history traversal before the command actually starts running. But much
> more likely is that Git just complains of ambiguity, because people tend
> to mention top-level paths in their commit messages. E.g.:
>
>   $ cd t
>   $ git grep foo :/Documentation
>   fatal: ambiguous argument ':/Documentation': both revision and filename
>
> So it really is a pretty horrible syntax.

It does not allow it to be further annotated like "HEAD^{/^Merge branch 'foo'}^2". Yes, I agree that ":/string" was a pretty poor design that was done without thinking things through.

But back then in 2007, it is a bit unfair to blame the initial design for not thinking things through. There weren't as many precedents, good or bad, to learn from than we have today ;-)