Subject: Re: [PATCH] revision: introduce --exclude=<glob> to tame wildcards

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2013 08:45:46 -0700

Felipe Contreras <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> People often find "git log --branches" etc. that includes _all_
>> branches is cumbersome to use when they want to grab most but except
>> some.  The same applies to --tags, --all and --glob.
>
> This idea looks very familiar, from the wording of this commit message
> it seems you came with the idea out of nowhere. Did you?

As the comment after three-dash quotes, the inspiration came from
this suggestion:

 > It may be a good idea to step back a bit and think of this topic as
 > a way to enhance the --branches option and its friends with only the
 > inclusive wildcard semantics.

which is not anything new.  It takes from J6t's

      To unclutter 'git branch' output, I rename work-in-progress branches
      to begin with "wip/", ready-to-merge branches do not carry this
      prefix. To inspect unmerged work of the latter kind of branches I
      would like to type... what?

But the thing is, that is nothing new, either.

Pretty much ever since we added --branches --tags and later --glob,

 (1) traversing from "almost all but minus some branches", and
 (2) stopping traversal at "almost all but minus some branches"

were what people sometimes wanted to have (which is pretty much what
the first paragraph of the proposed commit message says) using
"negative glob". Looking the phrase in the list archive finds for
example $gmane/159770 from 2010, but I would not be surprised if you
find older message wishing the same.