Re: [1.8.0] Support quoting in .gitattributes, .gitignore

[Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 2:03 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Migration plan:
>>
>> I think a release note mentioning this is enough. No migration needed.
>>
>> But to be safe, we can make post-1.7.5 warn users about patterns with
>> leading double quote. By 1.8.0, the new behavior will be used.
>
> That's obviously not a migration plan, and it is worse than not having the
> warning at all.  People with paths that begin with dq (which I suspect
> would be an empty set) will get wraning every time they do anything with
> git, and until 1.8.0 there is no way to turn that warnings off without
> breaking their pattern (like removing the entry from the attributes file),
> and when 1.8.0 comes their patterns will break.

Actually they can turn "<dq>abc" pattern to "[<dq>]abc". The tip
should be included in the warning. The warning would then be gone and
their patterns are 1.8.0-safe.

> How about introducing a new feature in .gitattributes file so that the
> parser can tell if the file is (1) written pre-1.7.5 that depends on the
> old behaviour, (2) written post-1.7.5 by a person who is aware of the dq
> convention, but still relying on the old behaviour, (3) written post-1.7.5
> to take advantage of the new behaviour?  E.g., you can explicitly mark
> your .gitattributes file by putting "# feature: no-cq-pattern" as the
> first line that the patterns in the file relies on the traditional
> behaviour, or "# feature: cq-pattern" to cause the parser to interpret
> cquoted patterns, and the last 1.7.x will warn if a file does not have
> this explicit marking, but has a pattern that would change the behaviour.
> Then 1.8.0 would flip the default.

Nice. Chances of having a pattern with leading dq are small enough
that I'd rarely need to add "#feature: cq-pattern" in new
.gitattributes (i.e it does not bother the majority of users).

So the syntax of this line would be:

# feature: <feature>[,<feature>]*

where features in lowercase are mandatory, Git will abort if it does
not understand such a feature. Features start with an uppercase letter
is optional. Hmm?
-- 
Duy