Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

On Sat, Feb 24 2018, Jeff King jotted:

quoted

I actually wonder if we should just specify that the patterns must
_always_ be fully-qualified, but may end with a single "/*" to iterate
over wildcards. Or even simpler, that "refs/heads/foo" would find that
ref itself, and anything under it.

I agree that this is a very good trade-off for now, but I think having
an escape hatch makes sense. It looks like the protocol is implicitly
extendible since another parameter could be added, but maybe having such
a parameter from the get-go would make sense:

I prefer to rely on the implicit extensibility (following the general
YAGNI principle).

In other words, we can introduce a pattern-type later and make the
current pattern-type the default.

Thanks for looking to the future.

[...]

E.g. if the refs were stored indexed using the method described at
https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html tail matching becomes no less
efficient than prefix matching, but a function of how many trigrams in
your index match the pattern given.

I think the nearest planned change to ref storage is [1], which is
still optimized for prefix matching.  Longer term, maybe some day
we'll want a secondary index that supports infix matching, or maybe
we'll never need it. :)

Sincerely,
Jonathan

[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/CAJo=hJsZcAM9sipdVr7TMD-FD2V2W6_pvMQ791EGCDsDkQ033w@mail.gmail.com/#t