Subject: Re: [PATCH] attr: support quoting pathname patterns in C style

From: Marc Strapetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:28:34 +0100

>>  Obvious regression: patterns that begin with double quote will
>>  now work differently.
> 
> I'm really hesitant to pursue this route and break people's existing
> setups

If existing setups are an issue, there could be a config-property
"core.gitAttributesQuoting" to enable quoting which will only be set for
newly created repositories. Personally, I don't think this effort is
necessary. Probably there is not even a single .gitattributes with a
leading quotation mark. And if there is, it's easy to fix.

In any case, I think future git repositories and users will be grateful
for quoting support: after I noticed problems with a tool-generated(!)
.gitattributes files, it took me 5 minutes to try: \-quoting, "-quoting
and octal-quoting, but more than 1 hour of googling, looking at git
sources and finally writing an email to this list :)

Marc.

On 05.11.2010 17:58, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>> Full pattern must be quoted. So 'pat"t"ern attr' will give exactly
>> 'pat"t"ern', not 'pattern'. Also clarify that leading whitespaces are
>> not part of the pattern and document comment syntax.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <[email-masked]>
>> ---
>>  Obvious regression: patterns that begin with double quote will
>>  now work differently.
> 
> I'm really hesitant to pursue this route and break people's existing
> setups, especially if the only benefit this patch tries to achieve is to
> allow somebody to say:
> 
>     "Program Files/*.txt" ...some attr...
> 
> It is not worth the effort, risk and headache, especially because people
> with such paths are probably already using
> 
>     Program?Files/*.txt	...some attr..
> 
> to match them.
> 
>