Re: [PATCH v4 5/5] fetch: reduce duplicate in ref update status lines with placeholder

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 6:33 AM, Eric Sunshine [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 1:58 AM, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

In the "remote -> local" line, if either ref is a substring of the
other, the common part in the other string is replaced with "$". For
example

    abc                -> origin/abc
    refs/pull/123/head -> pull/123

become

    abc         -> origin/$
    refs/$/head -> pull/123

Bikeshedding...

I think I recall in an earlier iteration that you asked for opinions
about '$', but don't recall if there were responses. Have you
considered '*' rather than '$'?

I did. But I remembered that * is used as wildcard in refspec, which
is specified on both sides, e.g. refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/foo/* and
wondered if it could cause a little confusion when the user sees '*'
only on one side here. But I have no strong opinion on '$' or '*' or
any other character. So if nobody says anything else, the next re-roll
will go with '*'.

In my brain, at least, '$' is associated so strongly with regex that
"origin/$" is interpreted automatically as anchoring "origin/" at the
end of string, and "refs/$/head" just feels weird.

On the other hand, '$' has been used as the variable expansion symbol
in shell, tcl, perl and php (which are probably the same thing since I
have a feeling all of them borrow '$' from one source, probably
shell). But yeah, '$' at the end could remind people of regexp too.

On the other hand, given the familiarity of shell globbing, "origin/*"
and "refs/*/head" feel quite natural and intuitive.

-- 
Duy