Subject: Re: [PATCH/alternative/raw and rough] setup.c: denote repo wide pathspecs by ':'

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:16:35 +0100

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy venit, vidit, dixit 01.03.2011 12:13:
> 2011/3/1 Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>:
>> Introduce a leading ':' as the notation for repo-wide pathspecs.
>>
>> This is in line with our treeish:path notation which defaults to
>> repowide paths.
>>
>> Heck: Even ':./path' works for pathspecs, and I have no clue why!
> 
> If you are going to turn pathspecs into something more complex,
> reserve room for future extension. I have negative pathspecs that can
> utilize it.
> 
> I take it, from now on people must refer file name ':foo' as './:foo'
> with your patch?

That is up for discussion, of course. When discussing a new approach for
file mode dependent attributes, I was hoping to get through with
symlink:path, and did not. But it was decided that something like
:symlink:path would be good enough, in the sense of avoiding enough
possible conflicts. That made me hope that :path would be, too.

(I have not checked for interaction of those two, which are in flight.)

I would think that file names like ":foo" are problematic on msys
already, so in a sense they are no-no already, and free to take as
special notation.

Michael