From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2020 19:27:35 GMT
Subject: Re: Bug or unexpected behaviour in git show <rev>:a\b
Message-ID: <xmqqk15gzmc8.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20200124190119.GB1672342@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> So everything is working as designed, or at least explainable. But I
> think there is some room for improvement. A backslash that isn't
> followed by a glob meta-character _is_ still a meta character (your
> "a\b" would be globbing for "ab"). But it's useless enough that I think
> it shouldn't be enough to trigger the "oh, you probably meant this as a
> pathspec" DWIM rule.

This sounds sensible.

> We _could_ also say "even though this could technically be a pathspec
> because of its metacharacter, it looks vaguely enough like a
> path-in-tree revision that we shouldn't guess". That I'm less
> comfortable with, just because it makes the heuristics even more
> magical.

Not just it becomes more magical, I am afraid that the code to
implement such a heuristics would be fragile and become a source of
unnecessary bugs.  Let's not go there.

I should learn to use "working as designed or at least explainable"
more often in my responses, by the way.  That's quite a useful and
good phrase ;-)