Re: [PATCH WIP 0/3] git log --exclude

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy [off-list ref] writes:

There may be a solution to mix depth limit and negative pathspec. I
haven't thought carefully about that because I lean towards a simpler
behaviour that only allows one negation level: a file is in if it
matches any positive pathspecs and none of negative ones.

I tend to think it probably is acceptable solution to define "struct
pathspec" to have one positive and one negative set, traversing and
declaring a match on what matches something from the positive set only if
it does not match anything in the negative set.

That is similar to how we define revision ranges in the sense that the
range notation to have two ranges (A..B C..D) does not mean union of two
sets (A..B + C..D), but is difference between two unions ((B D)-(A C)).

This is enough if narrow clones consist of positive pathspec only. I
really doubt if users would want to make a narrow clone that "contains
A but not A/B, storage-wise".

And if you define "struct pathspec" to have one positive and one negative
set, you do not have to limit narrow clone only to positive. The repository
specific narrow pathspec will have one such "struct pathspec", but the
user may give us from the command line another "struct pathspec". At
runtime, we would merge them to form into one negative and one positive
set, and apply the same rule: nothing that matches any negative will
appear in the traversal or in the output.