Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> writes:

quoted text
> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> writes:
>> 
>> > To find the blob object name given a tree and pathname, we were
>> > incorrectly calling "git ls-tree" with a "--" argument followed
>> > by the pathname of the file we wanted to get.
>> >
>> >   git ls-tree <TREE> -- --dashed/path/name.c
>> >
>> > Unlike many command-line interfaces, the "--" alone does not
>> > symbolize the end of non-option arguments on the command-line.
>> >
>> > ls-tree interprets the "--" as a prefix to match against, thus
>> > the entire contents of the --dashed/* hierarchy would be
>> > returned because the "--" matches "--dashed" and every path
>> > under it.
>> 
>> The above makes only half a sense to me.  In an empty directory:
>
> Ah, I think you missed this line:
>
> "the entire contents of the --dashed/* hierarchy would be"

Actually, that was what I was trying to demonstrate to be false.  Notice
the empty output from the first ls-tree with only -- and no other pathspec
on the command line.  "--" should not match "--dashed/*" anything (but
also notice that I said "should" here).

quoted text
>>     $ git init
>>     Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/empty/.git
>>     $ mkdir -p ./--dashed/path
>>     $ >./--dashed/path/name
>
> # Add a second file
> 	>./--dashed/path/ame

I think that is an independent bug.  Not just "--" but it appears "--d"
seems to hit it (and this is an ancient bug---even v1.0.0 seems to have
it).

quoted text
> [1] But if we had time travel we could just release git before any other
> SCM and hopefully not have to deal with SVN at all :)

;-)

I suspect that ls-tree needs a fix, not about "--" but about the pathspec
filtering.  It appears that the part that decides if a subtree is worth
traversing into uses the correct "is a pathspec pattern match leading path
components?" semantics (i.e. "--dashed" matches but "--" doesn't), but
after traversing into subtrees, the part that emits the output uses a
broken semantics "does the path have any pathspec patter as its prefix?"
It shouldn't check for "prefix", but for "leading path components", in
other words, the match must happen at directory boundaries.

And I do not think *this* bug is too late to fix.  We should fix it.

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