Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

The result of doing #1 is still "inexact" but at that point it is
unclear if we are being way too inexact to be useful.  If the
looseness bothers us too much, we may decide that #1 is not worth
doing.  But obviously the looseness did not bother us that much
until last week, so probably an obvious #3, do nothing, letting the
sleeping dog lie, might be what we want to do?

Personally, I would prefer #3 i.e. do nothing (even in the future; unless
it is removed all together). I also think that the current behaviour is not
"too inexact". Rather it would be too strict for `test_subcommand_inexact`
if we remove the ".*" thing here.

Inexact means that the line needs not to be exactly same - there may be
some words in between the desired words (in this case, any flags that come
between the desired sub-commands). The current behaviour (i.e. 
`local expr=$(printf '"%s".*' "$@")`) is justifying the name of the function.
Replacing ".*" with "," will therefore not work as the name of the function
suggests - it will rather work as `test_subcommand_starts_with`.

Only the `expr=${expr%,}.*" line needs to be changed, I think.

Thanks :)