[patch] syntax:plain for .hgignore

[Guido Ostkamp]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> This makes a sad sort of sense, and it suggests two things that we might
> want to consider:
>
>  1. Document this somewhere as an advisory hint.
>  2. Consider an anchor syntax for globs if we don't already have one.
>
> Offhand, it seems to me that a glob pattern starting with / can be 
> considered anchored.

Looks like a good idea to me.

> Failing that, we could augment the glob syntax by permitting a leading ^ 
> to indicate an anchor.

This character is a valid character in filenames, at least under Unix, so 
you can't use it for special purposes except when you allow some kind of 
escaping.

> In either case, we should be sure to document the behavior someplace if 
> that is not already done.
>
> Other thoughts?

I've asked Matt why 'match' is used instead of 'search' as I had expected. 
His answer was this:

"The matching engine supports both rooted and unrooted regexes and
globs."

However, IMHO you could easily use 'search' to implement 'rooted' regexes 
by including the prefix '^' for these cases. For all other cases, you 
would save the '.*' that currently gets in the way and seems to lead to 
the performance loss.

Regards

Guido