Re: Fwd: Possibly nicer pathspec syntax?

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

And my earlier response goes to the list ;-)

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

It is, I think, a no-brainer to lift the "you must have at least one positive". If the user says "not this and that", it is reasonable to assume that "but include everything else" is implied.

As to "!" that triggers history substitution without quoting, it may be annoying and I think it is probably OK to pick a synonym letter, perhaps "^", now that the set of pathspec magics do not seem to be growing rapidly and there may not be any other existing magic that the natural meaning of "^" would match better than "negate". The primary reason why we used ! is, I think, to match patterns in the exclude files.

As to the leading ":", that is shared between the ":(long form)" and the short form, I am a bit hesitant to lose it. It allows the users to be trained only once, i.e. "if you want to match a path without magic in your working tree, you need to watch out for an unusual path that begins with a colon, which may be quite minority to begin with. You just prefix ./ in front to defeat it. Everything else you can type as-is, modulo wildcard metacharacters, but you know that already." and their brains need no upgrading. Once we start accepting short forms without the ":", every time we add a short form magic, the users need to be retrained.

In short, this

in addition to "no positives? let's pretend you also said '.' as a positive", would not be too bad, methinks. And that allows this

to become

    git diff -M --dirstat .. -- :^{drivers,arch}

which is a bit shorter.  I personally am perfectly fine without ^, i.e.

    git diff -M --dirstat .. -- :\!{drivers,arch}

though.

By the way, I am wondering why this is private, not cc'ed to the mailing list. As messages addressed to gitster@ without git@vger bypass my Inbox and gets thrown into spam box, which I only occasionally scan to resurrect messages worth responding, and this is one of those cases ;-)