Re: Unexpected (bug-like) behavior in `git ls-remote` matching.

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2023 at 08:49:57AM -0500, William Blevins wrote:

> This still feels "weird" to me. Other pattern matching tools like grep
> and sed don't have exceptions to their behavior like this.
> 
> Can you reference the unit tests that verifies this specific behavior?

See commit 631f0f8c4b (ls-remote: do not send ref prefixes for patterns,
2018-10-31), which also adds a test. However, it was just handling
existing behavior (which in fact confused another developer and caused a
bug which the commit was fixing!).

I think the tail-matching behavior is not what we would probably choose
today, but that is how it has behaved since 2005, and we are not going
to break backwards compatibility in a plumbing tool like ls-remote.

There's some discussion in this thread about adding a new option to do
prefix-matching, but I don't think any code was ever written:

  https://lore.kernel.org/git/m2k12g7v5u.fsf@gmail.com/

Likewise, something more elaborate like full-path globbing or even
regex matching would be possible, but would need to be activated by an
option.

-Peff