Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Sat, Aug 02, 2025 at 10:56:28PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

quoted

So I wonder if we have painted ourselves into a compatibility corner a
bit, if we have two conflicting expectations. We might be better off
just teaching check_filename() to parse multiple of [^/!] and the
trailing colon. It's horrible and not great for maintainability, but
this syntax is not something that changes often.

Ah, OK.

So the idea is that when given _as_ a pathspec element (e.g., after
an explicit "--" separator), we do want to interpret ":file.txt" as
the same as "file.txt", but when dwimming to sift revs and pathspec
elements apart, prefer to take it as a blob object name in the
index?

Yeah, I think that is a good way of framing / justifying it; DWIM can be
looser because it's inherently about heuristics.

I don't plan to do anything with this topic anytime soon, but maybe Ben
wants to produce a patch in that direction.

-Peff

PS I'll be offline for a week or so starting tomorrow, so apologies for
   any discussions I leave hanging.

Thanks for a heads-up, and enjoy your time off away from the list
;-)