Subject: Re: [PATCH] t3070: skip ls-files tests with backslash patterns on Windows

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:23:10 +0900

Kristofer Karlsson <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Thu, 28 May 2026 at 22:26, Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Two questions.
>>
>>  * Has this been broken on Windows since October, or has something
>>    external change on Windows recently?  I do not know.  Anybody
>>    knows?
>>
>>  * Is this change a workaround that sweeps ugly breakage under the
>>    rug, or is backslash inherently unusable as an excape character
>>    when handling paths on Windows (which I am afraid would make
>>    wildmatch fairly useless there)?
>>
>
> I am fairly new to the git ecosystem as a developer (not as a user),
> so I am not sure how long this has been broken. The backslash patterns
> in the ls-files test path predate 8a6d158a - patterns like 'foo\*'
> and '[\-_]' have been there since de8bada2bf (2018) - so it may
> have been failing for a while before anyone noticed.

Hmph.

> My thinking was that it would be good in general if the CI results
> were green and did not include false positives for errors that we
> know cannot work on this platform. The risk is that people stop
> looking into CI failures in detail because they start to assume it
> is the same old backslash problem.

Oh, no question about that.

> That said, there is also a risk that the real underlying issue does
> not get fixed. I am hoping it is sufficient that the BSLASHPSPEC
> prereq and the case *\\* filter make it obvious to anyone reading
> the test what we are skipping over and why.
>
>> Will queue.  Thanks.
>
> Thanks! It felt a bit heavyweight to add noise to the list for trivial CI test
> changes but I suppose the process is the same even if it does not
> affect the production code.

Sure.  I just found it a little disturbing to declare that there
won't be ways on Windows to quote special letters with backslash
when writing wildmatch patterns.  But if some Windows folks got
motivated enough, they are capable of lifting the prereq when they
fix the underlying code as well, so it probably is not something I
should be worrying too much about.

Thanks.