Re: Missing ? wildcard character in gitignore documentation

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

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.

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.