Re: [PATCH v2] ls-files: add pathspec matching for submodules

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

Brandon Williams <bmwill@google.com> writes:

> On a similar but slightly different note.  In general do we want
> the pathspec '??b' to match against the sib/ directory and
> subsequently have ls-files print all entries inside of the sib/
> directory?  (this is in the non-recursive case)

I'd need to find time to dig a bit of history before I can give a
firm opinion on this, but here is a knee-jerk version of my reaction.

 * A pathspec element that matches literally to a directory causes
   itself and everything underneath the directory match that
   element, e.g. "sib" would be considered a match.

 * Otherwise, a pathspec that matches with the whole path as a
   pattern matches the path, e.g. "??b" would match "sib" itself,
   but not "sib/file".  Note that "??b*" would match "sib" and
   "sib/file" because the pattern match is without FNM_PATNAME
   unless ':(glob)' magic is in effect.

Historically, some commands treated a pathspec as purely a prefix
match (i.e. the former) and did not use _any_ pattern matching,
while other commands did both of the above two (e.g. compare ls-tree
and ls-files).  I thought we were slowly moving towards unifying
them, but apparently 'git log -- "D?cumentation"' does not show
anything close to what 'git log -- Documentation' gives us even in
today's Git.

Probably we want to change it at some point so that a pattern that
matches one leading directory would cause everything underneath to
match, e.g. "??b" would include "sib/file" just because "sib" would.