Behavior of 'git add \*.txt': bug or feature?

Behavior of 'git add \*.txt': bug or feature?

[Matthieu Moy]

Hi,

I find the behavior of 'git add \*.txt' strange: for adding untracked
files, it considers \*.txt as a pattern to match, but for updating
existing file's staged content, it seems to consider it as a filename:

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
#
#       modified:   three.txt
#       modified:   two.txt
#
# Untracked files:
#
#       one.txt
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
$ git add -v '*.txt'
add 'one.txt'
$ git add -v '*.txt'
$ 

I would have expected this "git add -v '*.txt'" to update the staged
content of two.txt and three.txt too.

It this the intended behavior? If so, what's the rationale for this?

Thanks,

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/

Re: Behavior of 'git add \*.txt': bug or feature?

[Junio C Hamano]

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

> It this the intended behavior? If so, what's the rationale for this?

I strongly suspect that it comes from the fact that we have two
definitions and three implementations of pathspec-aware tree traversal.
One family is unaware of shell-glob wildcards (they only do leading
directory path match) while the other know both leading directory path and
shell-glob.

It is on the list of long-term items to fix, as the change required is
quite involved.

Re: Behavior of 'git add \*.txt': bug or feature?

[Matthieu Moy]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:
>
>> It this the intended behavior? If so, what's the rationale for this?
>
> I strongly suspect that it comes from the fact that we have two
> definitions and three implementations of pathspec-aware tree traversal.
> One family is unaware of shell-glob wildcards (they only do leading
> directory path match) while the other know both leading directory path and
> shell-glob.
>
> It is on the list of long-term items to fix, as the change required is
> quite involved.

OK, that answers my question.

Thanks,

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/

Re: Behavior of 'git add \*.txt': bug or feature?

[Clemens Buchacher]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 01:30:15PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I strongly suspect that it comes from the fact that we have two
> definitions and three implementations of pathspec-aware tree traversal.
> One family is unaware of shell-glob wildcards (they only do leading
> directory path match) while the other know both leading directory path and
> shell-glob.

We had a discussion about this in January:

	Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] implement pattern matching in ce_path_match
	Message-ID: <7vljtd20m6.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
	http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/105679

I was going to fix it, but motivation left me after the above discussion,
since I don't really care about this feature.

Clemens