Re: [PATCH] gitignore: warn about pointless syntax

On Tuesday 2012-01-10 07:01, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

quoted

That being said, if this is such a commonly-requested feature

Was it actually requested, or did you mean "commonly attempted use"?
As I see it, foo/**/*.o for example is equal to placing "*.o" in
foo/.gitignore, so the feature is already implemented, just not
through the syntax people falsely assume it is.

You can either adjust the people, i.e. teach that their "false" assumption
is wrong and the feature they expect is available but not in a way that
they expect. Or you can adjust the tool to match their expectation.
[...]in real life, people are harder to train than tools[...]

Though, having one more way to do things leads to a certain mess at a 
later point, if such mess is not already present. I am thinking here of 
the precedent iptables option parser set by removing support for 
exclamation marks in odd positions, as it was redundant ("more than 1 
way"), was only supported by ~45% of all options and had to be 
explicitly invoked at every callsite - so in fact was harder on users 
than git would be for **. There were a few mails by people who could not 
seem to read error messages, but overall, within 6-9 months, everything 
was quiet again. So, that's the empiric result of what teaching-the-tool 
would do.