Re: [RFC] Refspec patterns with * in the middle

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

Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org> wrote:
>>> But the following is not:
>>>
>>>  - foo/bar*/baz
>>>
>>> IOW, '*' can only appear as a non-terminating symbol if it is bounded
>>> by '/' on each side.
>>
>> You have my criterion right, but I want that to be valid, but only match
>> things like "foo/bar-something/baz", not "foo/bar-a/b/baz".
>
> Ah, that makes sense. Perhaps use "**" to mean matching across path
> components which is what rsync does:
>
>  o  a '*' matches any non-empty path component (it stops at slashes).
>  o  use '**' to match anything, including slashes.
>
> ?

I personally do not think that makes much sense (and I find ** ugly, too).

We traditionally supported '*' only at the end, and it always has meant
"match through the end, including slashes".

Requiring 'match including slashes' to be spelled as '**' only when it is
not at the end is unnecessarily confusing.

Is there a valid use case when * wants to match across directory
boundaries when it is not at the end?  I offhand do not think of a sane
one.

So, it might make it easiest to understand if we say * usually does not
match slash, except when it is used at the end immediately after a slash,
in which case it means "match through the end".