Re: [PATCH 2/2] diff: document the pattern format for diff.orderFile

Richard Hansen [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Back then we didn't even have wildmatch(), and used fnmatch()
instead, so forcing FNM_PATHNAME would have meant that people
wouldn't be able to say "foo*bar" to match "foo/other/bar"; with
wildmatch, "foo**bar" lets you defeat WM_PATHNAME so having
WM_PATHNAME always in effect is less of an issue, but with
fnmatch(), having FNM_PATHNAME always in effect has a lot of
downside.

Ah, that makes sense.

quoted

I'd expect that orderfile people have today will be broken and
require tweaking if you switched WM_PATHNAME on.

OK, so we don't want to turn on WM_PATHNAME unless we do it for a new
major version.

I do agree with you that if we were starting Git from scratch, or at
least if we were adding diff.orderfile feature today, we would have
used wildmatch(WM_PATHNAME) for this matching.  We would also have
used the same parser as used to read the exclude files (and when we
see negative matching entries in the parsed result, either errored
out or ignored them with warning).  That kind of change unfortunately
would require a major version bump, I am afraid.