From: "Junio C Hamano" <gits...@pobox.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 9:44 PM
Angelo Borsotti <angelo.borso...@gmail.com> writes:
The issue here is that the paths must denote filenames that are
present in the index
or tree-ish, so, wildcards are misleading since they would instead be
interpreted
with respect to the working directory.
When you are talking to a shell (and you almost never directly talk
to Git), wildcards are always interpreted with respect to the
working directory by the shell. And that is not specific to Git.
A possible way to make this clear is to warn the user to quote paths
that contain
wildcards. Something like, e.g.:
"Note that <paths> that contain wildcards must be quoted in order
to
denote files that
belong to the index or <tree-ish>. Otherwise, they are interpreted
by the shell with
respect to the current directory, with a result that may depend on
the shell."
Perhaps, if you drop ", with a result..." from that sentence.
Even though that description is a bit too much on the side of "shell
primer" than "git documentation" for my taste, I could see it may
help some people, so I wouldn't reject such a phrasing out of hand.
Let's see what others feel.
A comment about the need to quote wild cards would certainly be of
advantage to many Windows users who won't have used a shell in that way
before.
Plus I suspect that a large fraction of basic unix/linux users will have
never really considered the difference between shell expansion and git
expansion in this case where there are two diifferent 'file systems', as
demonstrated by the initial query.
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