Stefan Sperling wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:36:13AM +0000, Julian Foad wrote: > > This patch appears to have the filter reversed: it lets the user specify > > paths that the filter should REMOVE, which IMO is not so useful. > > Why isn't that useful? I think either way (include and exclude) is useful.
I understand that TortoiseSVN wants the include/exclude functionality available at the API. I wonder if "supply a list of patterns to include" is really the best API. If I were writing a GUI that wanted to show a list of what the patch is about to patch, I would want an API that told me, first of all, what are the paths that this patch file is going to patch. Maybe a callback that says: "I'm about to patch the target file TARGET_ABSPATH. If you want, you can set TARGET_ABSPATH to a different target, or set it to NULL if you don't want to apply this file-patch at all." Using that, I could either get a list of all targets in the patch (and make it a dry-run by returning TARGET_ABSPATH = NULL on each callback), or control which targets are applied, by any pattern- or list-matching scheme I like, or apply to different paths, or just apply the patch normally by not providing a callback function at all, all with the same simple API. Is there a real practical need to have the include/exclude functionality in "svn" as well? I can't think of a use that's important enough to justify it. Can you? GNU patch doesn't have it (and it doesn't have an "include-only" filter either). > > (Using the word "filter" as a verb is ambiguous: it's never clear > > whether you want to keep the big particles that the filter catches or > > the liquid that passes through - or both, in two separate bowls.) > > Yes, we're aware of all this. > See http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3599 I hadn't seen that. > My plan is to add an --include-pattern option (at the CLI level as well > as the API level), and if both --include-pattern and --exclude-pattern > options have been specified, have the --exclude-pattern option operate on > any files left after one or more --include-pattern options were used to > limit the patch target list to a given list of files. I just don't want us to make it more flexible than it needs to be. Have you thought about consistency with other svn commands? How does this relate to "--targets="? To the "ignore patterns"? Are the glob patterns using the same syntax as auto-props? > I'm also planning on renaming the 'glob_filter' parameter of the API > to 'exclude_patterns' so it matches the terminology used by the CLI > and does not say 'filter' anymore. That sounds good. Thanks. - Julian
