Re: Bug: problem with file named with dash character

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 03:17:54PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > I think that's bad. I wonder if it should have "*" attributes applied to
> > it or not. While I can see it being convenient in some cases, I think it
> > makes the rules confusingly complex.
> 
> It is likely that the crlf conversion on Dos systems wants to be
> applied regardless.

Yeah, that's specifically the case I was thinking of. I would say "well,
we don't need to care about path at all, they can just use
core.autocrlf", but I think autocrlf is discouraged these days in favor
of using attributes.

> This is unrelated to the "standard input confusion" issue, but there
> are two more things coming either from the way the no-index code is
> done or from the way it is bolted onto git.
> 
> With the current code, this:
> 
> 	mkdir foo bar
>         echo hello >foo/1
>         echo bye >bar/2
>         git diff --no-index foo bar
> 
> shows differences between a/foo/1 and b/bar/1, as the no-index code
> records foo/1 and bar/1 as the paths in the filespec for them.
> 
> But if you are comparing two directory hierarchies, it is a lot more
> likely that you would want to see corresponding files in these two
> directories.  In other words, the patch is better shown as
> differences between a/1 and b/1 (the code makes the core compare
> foo/1 and bar/2 after all).  This of course requires no-index to
> differentiate the logical pathname (i.e. "this is the path inside
> collection a/ (or b/)") and the physical location from which the
> contents are read.  Such a differentiation would allow us to also do
> renames and rename classifications much more sanely.  We had to add
> DIFF_PAIR_RENAME() and filepair->renamed_pair only to support this
> codepath because of this misdesign.  We could have just run strcmp()
> between the logical pathname of one/two members of the filepair to
> see if the pair was renamed if it was done that way.

Yeah, that makes sense. Really you want to split the idea of
diff_filespec into a logical unit of "the thing I am diffing" and a
source struct of "here is where I get the data from". And the latter
could be a union of blob information, filesystem path, and stdin flag,
all contained inside the filespec.

> And the way diff-no-index.c::queue_diff() walks two directories to
> grab paths from them in parallel and incrementally means that the
> filesystem walking code cannot be reused for something like this:
> 
> 	git diff master:Documentation /var/tmp/docs
> 
> to compare a hierarchy represented with a tree object with another
> hierarchy stored in the filesystem outside git's control.  A natural
> way to do so would be to grab a set of paths from /var/tmp/docs and
> have that set compared against the other set that comes from the tree,
> and the "grab a set of paths from /var/tmp/docs" machinery can be
> used twice to implement the current
> 
> 	git diff --no-index /var/tmp/foo /var/tmp/bar
> 
> which would have been a lot cleaner implementation.

Agreed. I have occasionally wanted to do something like the tree
comparison you mentioned above, and I think I resorted to actually
making a git tree out of it.

All of that is nice, and if you feel like working on it, great. But I
admit I don't care too much about the --no-index code path. The key
thing to me is fixing the "-" path in the regular code path without
regressing the no-index stdin code-path too badly. And I think your
patches already do that, so it might be a good stopping point.

-Peff