Re: [PATCH] doc: ls-tree paths do not support wildcards

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 03:21:34PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> >   1. Deprecate the current behavior in the documentation and release
> >      notes, encouraging people who want literal matching to use
> >      --literal-pathspecs or the ":(literal)" magic. AFAICT we've
> >      supported these since at least 2013 for this command, so it should
> >      be safe to use unconditionally.
> >
> >   2. Add a new option, "--use-pathspecs" or similar, that switches the
> >      matching code to use match_pathspec(). That lets people use the new
> >      feature immediately if they want to.
> >
> >   3. When --use-pathspecs is not in use, warn to stderr about any
> >      wildcard characters in the input. That reinforces the deprecation
> >      notice in (1) and is likely to get more people's attention.
> 
> Hmph, if we are serious about deprecation and migration, I would
> image that in stage #1, we should do this check already.  When
> "--literal-pathspecs" is NOT in use, if a pathspec would change its
> meaning if not taken literally (e.g. has glob letters, begins with
> :-magic introducer, etc.), we warn and do so from the very beginning
> of the migration process.

Yeah, sorry, I meant these three steps to all happen at once.

Technically we don't need step (2) in there for the deprecation, but I
think it lets people adjust to the new world order as their solution to
avoid the warning (though I guess literal-pathspecs would also prevent
the warning; we wouldn't be looking for "*" in the input so much as
checking whether the parsed pathspec contains a wildcard).

> >   4. After several releases, flip the default to --use-pathspecs,
> >      leaving --no-use-pathspecs as an escape hatch for people who still
> >      haven't switched their scripts.
> 
> Wouldn't --literal-pathspecs be the accepted escape hatch that will
> always be accepted, even after --use-pathspecs becomes a no-op?

Hmm, I guess so. That wouldn't restore the behavior as it is _now_, but
the current behavior is sort of pointless. It treats pathspec magic as
special, but not globs. I doubt anybody actually wants that; they'd
either want pathspecs or literal paths.

-Peff