Re: [RFC/PATCH 5/7] grep: drop support for \0 in --fixed-strings <pattern>

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 26, 2019, 16:14 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqftnwe32i.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20190626000329.32475-6-avarab@gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason  <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Change "-f <file>" to not support patterns with "\0" in them under
> --fixed-strings, we'll now only support these under --perl-regexp with
> PCRE v2.
>
> A previous change to Documentation/git-grep.txt changed the
> description of "-f <file>" to be vague enough as to not promise that
> this would work, and by dropping support for this we make it a whole
> lot easier to move away from the kwset backend, which a subsequent
> change will try to do.
>
> Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
> ---

This step, together with all others, looks sensibly justified to me only when I wear tinted glasses that make me pretend that the final goal is to promote pcre backend, which is much more important than serving the current users. When I remove the glasses, it smells more like making excuses.

But as we saw discussed in the previous thread, I too think it is OK to make 'Nobody would notice the updated behaviour of NUL in the patterns' our working assumption and see if anybody screams---after all we have to start somewhere to make progress.

A very good thing about this series is that it does *not* add a new feature that people would miss, even if it went straight to 'master' and to the next release. All it does is to optimize differently and changing the behaviour we assume nobody depends on.

It is easy enough to revert the whole thing if it turns out to be problematic even in the worst case, and nobody would notice ;-)