Re: Missing ? wildcard character in gitignore documentation

[Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 6:07 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 30 2018, Duy Nguyen jotted:
>
>> On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 10:47:10AM -0500, Randall S. Becker wrote:
>>> The implication of support for ? is there through the following paragraph from the gitignore documentation:
>>>
>>>     "Otherwise, Git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for
>>>     consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag: wildcards
>>>     in the pattern will not match a / in the pathname. For example,
>>>     "Documentation/*.html" matches "Documentation/git.html" but not
>>>     "Documentation/ppc/ppc.html" or
>>>     "tools/perf/Documentation/perf.html"."
>>>
>>> Of course you have to go read fnmatch(3), so it might be good for
>>> expand on this here :).
>>
>> I agree. How about something like this?
>>
>> -- 8< --
>> Subject: [PATCH] gitignore.txt: elaborate shell glob syntax
>>
>> `fnmatch(3)` is a great mention if the intended audience is
>> programmers. For normal users it's probably better to spell out what
>> a shell glob is.
>>
>> This paragraph is updated to roughly tell (or remind) what the main
>> wildcards are supposed to do. All the details are still hidden away
>> behind the `fnmatch(3)` wall because bringing the whole specification
>> here may be too much.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
>> ---
>>  Documentation/gitignore.txt | 11 +++++------
>>  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/Documentation/gitignore.txt b/Documentation/gitignore.txt
>> index 63260f0056..0f4b1360bd 100644
>> --- a/Documentation/gitignore.txt
>> +++ b/Documentation/gitignore.txt
>> @@ -102,12 +102,11 @@ PATTERN FORMAT
>>     (relative to the toplevel of the work tree if not from a
>>     `.gitignore` file).
>>
>> - - Otherwise, Git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable
>> -   for consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag:
>> -   wildcards in the pattern will not match a / in the pathname.
>> -   For example, "Documentation/{asterisk}.html" matches
>> -   "Documentation/git.html" but not "Documentation/ppc/ppc.html"
>> -   or "tools/perf/Documentation/perf.html".
>> + - Otherwise, Git treats the pattern as a shell glob: '{asterisk}'
>> +   matches anything except '/', '?' matches any one character except
>> +   '/' and '[]' matches one character in a selected range. See
>> +   fnmatch(3) and the FNM_PATHNAME flag for a more accurate
>> +   description.
>>
>>   - A leading slash matches the beginning of the pathname.
>>     For example, "/{asterisk}.c" matches "cat-file.c" but not
>
> When reading the docs the other day I was thinking that we should
> entirely git rid of these references to fnmatch(3) and write a
> gitwildmatch man page.

That's even better :) I forgot that we don't use fnmatch anymore.

> One of the reasons for why fnmatch() was removed as a supported backend
> was because it couldn't be relied on as a backend, so it doesn't make
> sense to be referring to that OS-level documentation, wildmatch also has
> other features.



-- 
Duy