ag, **, and the GPL

> The Silver Search (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher), is
> a small, open source, cross platform searching utility written as a
> replacement for ack.  One of the major benefits of Ag (and a source
> for much of its speed) is that it obeys .gitignore.  However, Ag
> currently treats gitignores as regexs which produces incorrect results
> for e.g. **.  I'd like to add support to ag to obey the .gitignore
> spec but I'm not keen on implementing yet another fnmatch clone.  Ag
> is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 which to the best of
> my understanding is incompatible with the GPLv2.  Would you grant me
> permission to reuse wildmatch.c (and necessary includes) for use in
> Ag?

> On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 20:50 -0800, Matthew Kaniaris wrote:
>> The Silver Search (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher), is
>> a small, open source, cross platform searching utility written as a
>> replacement for ack.  One of the major benefits of Ag (and a source
>> for much of its speed) is that it obeys .gitignore.  However, Ag
>> currently treats gitignores as regexs which produces incorrect results
>> for e.g. **.  I'd like to add support to ag to obey the .gitignore
>> spec but I'm not keen on implementing yet another fnmatch clone.  Ag
>> is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 which to the best of
>> my understanding is incompatible with the GPLv2.  Would you grant me
>> permission to reuse wildmatch.c (and necessary includes) for use in
>> Ag?
>
> I already implemented this without using any git code at
> https://github.com/novalis/the_silver_searcher.  The patch was rejected
> because it slowed down ag slightly (or perhaps because it was overly
> complex).

> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:57 AM, David Turner <dturner@twopensource.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 20:50 -0800, Matthew Kaniaris wrote:
> >> The Silver Search (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher), is
> >> a small, open source, cross platform searching utility written as a
> >> replacement for ack.  One of the major benefits of Ag (and a source
> >> for much of its speed) is that it obeys .gitignore.  However, Ag
> >> currently treats gitignores as regexs which produces incorrect results
> >> for e.g. **.  I'd like to add support to ag to obey the .gitignore
> >> spec but I'm not keen on implementing yet another fnmatch clone.  Ag
> >> is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 which to the best of
> >> my understanding is incompatible with the GPLv2.  Would you grant me
> >> permission to reuse wildmatch.c (and necessary includes) for use in
> >> Ag?
> >
> > I already implemented this without using any git code at
> > https://github.com/novalis/the_silver_searcher.  The patch was rejected
> > because it slowed down ag slightly (or perhaps because it was overly
> > complex).
> 
> Interesting. Do you have a direct link to that discussion (I don't
> know how to navigate that novalis link). Generally you (or ag) should
> avoid fnmatch/wildmatch whenever possible. Hitting those *match()
> _will_ slow things down (and git tries hard to avoid it). I had some
> optimizations on top of rsync wildmatch to handle "*" case better, but
> I don't think it'll make big difference in practice.

>                                                                   Ag
> is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 which to the best of
> my understanding is incompatible with the GPLv2.  Would you grant me
> permission to reuse wildmatch.c (and necessary includes) for use in
> Ag?