Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/5] backfill: work with prefix pathspecs

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:54:58 +0100

On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 09:15:00AM -0400, Derrick Stolee wrote:
> On 3/17/2026 6:10 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> >> Update the path-walk API to accept certain kinds of pathspecs and to
> >> silently ignore anything too complex.
> > 
> > Hmph, "silently ignore", instead of "no, you cannot use that! and
> > die", or at least "sorry, I cannot do that, so the result may not be
> > what you wanted, you've been warned"?
> 
> The behavior when silently ignoring is to over-download. The revision
> walk still filters commits, but the path-walk then walks paths beyond
> that pathspec. This will be fixed in the next commit, so adding an
> error case didn't seem worth it. I'll do a better job foreshadowing.

I guess this is a fine tradeoff when documented properly. But I think in
that case we should make very clear that this behaviour may change in
the future if find a way to efficiently limit the pathwalk, too.

Patrick