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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

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

> 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 ;-)