[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Obsoleting abrowse

[Matthieu Moy]

David Allouche <address@hidden> writes:

> This one bothers me a bit for a couple of reasons:
>
>       * The repetitive use of ".*"
>       * The fact that your regexp does not _really_ means what it
>         appears to mean, because "." still matches any single character.

Well, this is a problem with regular expressions, but for anyone used
to grep, sed, perl, ..., it shouldn't be a problem.

> At this point you could guess that I'm advocating the use of globs
> instead of regexps by default.
>
> I'm suggesting the switches
>
>       * "-S, --string" interpret the argument as a fixed string
>       * "-G, --glob" interpret the argument as a glob (default)
>       * "-R, --regex" interpret the argument as a regular expression

That's an option. I think glob would be sufficient in 99.999% of the
case (who would want to write things like "a(bc)*d" to match against
file or branch names).

I have two arguments againts globs:

* Arch's tradition is to use regexp ({arch}/=tagging-method, argument
  of "baz archives", ...)

* I don't know how to implement globs ;-).

> Generally, I like the "no implicit wildcard" approach, even though it
> seems a bit cumbersome at first, as I expect it to be compatible with
> the future branch directory that will take the place of the a/c-b-v
> directory when namespace is decoupled from storage and identification.

Actually, rbrowse is already going in that direction. categories,
branches and versions are never accessed nor displayed separately.

-- 
Matthieu