On Tuesday 2012-01-10 07:01, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>>>That being said, if this is such a commonly-requested feature
>>
>>Was it actually requested, or did you mean "commonly attempted use"?
>>As I see it, foo/**/*.o for example is equal to placing "*.o" in
>>foo/.gitignore, so the feature is already implemented, just not
>>through the syntax people falsely assume it is.
>
>You can either adjust the people, i.e. teach that their "false" assumption
>is wrong and the feature they expect is available but not in a way that
>they expect. Or you can adjust the tool to match their expectation.
>[...]in real life, people are harder to train than tools[...]
Though, having one more way to do things leads to a certain mess at a
later point, if such mess is not already present. I am thinking here of
the precedent iptables option parser set by removing support for
exclamation marks in odd positions, as it was redundant ("more than 1
way"), was only supported by ~45% of all options and had to be
explicitly invoked at every callsite - so in fact was harder on users
than git would be for **. There were a few mails by people who could not
seem to read error messages, but overall, within 6-9 months, everything
was quiet again. So, that's the empiric result of what teaching-the-tool
would do.
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