On 17.10.2012 20:17, Stefan Sperling wrote:
On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 12:20:20PM -0400, Hyrum K Wright wrote:
There are several places where regular expressions would be useful in
Subversion. Off hand, the new log --search feature and svn:ignore
properties feel like they'd be use candidates for regexs, and they
could probably also apply to authz rules eventually. I'm sure there
are more.
How do we change existing features from glob syntax to regex without
breaking compatibility? A glob pattern can of course be expressed in
regex syntax, but the syntax isn't equivalent. Can we reliably detect
whether a given pattern (say, on a line within svn:ignore) is a glob
pattern or a regex?
For instance, what about "a*.txt"? In glob this means: starts with 'a',
followed by any amount of characters, and ends with '.txt'. But in regex
it means: starts with any number of 'a' characters (including zero), and
ends with '.txt'.
$ ls *.txt | egrep 'a*.txt'
a.txt
aaa.txt
bbb.txt
foo.txt
$ ls a*.txt | egrep 'a*.txt'
a.txt
aaa.txt
$
(where ls uses glob syntax and egrep uses regex)
In such situations, to keep the compatibility, why not just introduce a
new property, e.g. 'svn:ignore-regex' which if set takes precedence over
the 'svn:ignore' property?
Stefan
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