Re: ls-tree and wildcards

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

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Later Nguyen and others started working on unifying the two separate
"pathspec" semantics and we are probably halfway there.  Many of the
commands from "diff/log" family now can take wildcard (there may be new
bugs in the codepaths, though), but "ls-tree" has not been converted.

Do we break backward compatibility by teaching ls-tree new pathspec
semantics? I guess directories with wildcards in the name are rare,
the chance of someone doing "ls-tree a*" is low. But I may miss
something.

If you change ls-tree to use its paths arguments as pathspec, you will
break backward compatibility.

But nobody stops us from _adding_ an option to ls-tree to tell it to
switch between the two, i.e.

	git ls-tree HEAD -- '*.c'
	git ls-tree --pathspec HEAD -- '*.c'

The former will use the traditional "leading path match only" while the
latter uses the (to-be) unified "pathspec" semantics.

Internally, the implementation could very well do something like this
after parsing the options:

	if (!opt_pathspec)
        	prefix ":(noglob)" to all paths args

and use the updated code with magic pathspec support to handle both cases.