Hi Duy & Brandon, in 74ed43711fd (grep: enable recurse-submodules to work on <tree> objects, 2016-12-16), the do_match() function in tree-walk.c was changed so that it can recurse across submodule boundaries.
However, there is a bug, and I *think* there may be two bugs actually. Or even three. First of all, here is an MCVE that I distilled from https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/1371: git init repo cd repo git init submodule git -C submodule commit -m initial --allow-empty touch "[bracket]" git add "[bracket]" git commit -m bracket git add submodule git commit -m submodule git rev-list HEAD -- "[bracket]" Nothing fancy, just adding a file with brackets in the name, then a submodule, then showing the commit history filtered by the funny file name. However, the log prints *both* commits. Clearly the submodule commit should *not* be shown. Now, how does this all happen? Since the pathspec contains brackets, parse_pathspec() marks it as containing wildcards and sets nowildcard_len to 0. Now, note that [bracket] *is* a wildcard expression: it should only match a single character that is one of a, b, c, e, k, r or t. I think this is the first bug: `git rev-list` should not even match the commit that adds the file [bracket] because its file name does not match that expression. From where I sit, it would appear that f1a2ddbbc2d (tree_entry_interesting(): optimize wildcard matching when base is matched, 2010-12-15) simply added the fnmatch() code without disabling the literal match_entry() code when the pathspec contains a pattern. But it does not stop there: there is *another* bug which causes the pattern to somehow match the submodule. I *guess* the idea of https://github.com/git/git/commit/74ed43711#diff-7a08243175f2cae66aedf53f7dce3bdfR1015 was to allow a pattern like *.c to match files in a submodule, but the pattern [bracket] should not match any file in submodule/. I think that that code needs to be a little bit more careful to try to match the submodule's name against the pattern (it seems to interpret nowildcard_len == 0 to mean that the wildcard is `*`). However, the commit introducing that code wanted to teach *grep* (not *rev-list*) a new trick, and it relies on the `recursive` flag of the pathspec to be set. And now it gets really interesting. Or confusing, depending on your mental condition. This recursive flag of the pathspec is set in ll_diff_tree_paths() (yep, changing the flag in the passed-in opt structure... which I found a bit... unexpected, given the function name, I would have been less surprised if that function only diff'ed the trees and used the options without changing the options). That flag-change was introduced in https://github.com/git/git/commit/bc96cc87dbb2#diff-15203e8cd8ee9191113894de9d97a8a6R149 which is another patch that changed the tree diff machinery to accommodate `git grep` (but maybe not really paying a lot of attention to the fact that the same machinery is called repeatedly by the revision machinery, too). I am really confused by this code mainly due to the fact that the term "recursive" is pretty ambiguous in that context: does it refer to directories/tree objects, or to submodules? I guess it is used for both when there should be two flags so that rev-list can recurse over tree objects but not submodules (unless told to do so). The problem, of course, is that `git rev-list HEAD -- '[bracket]'` never recurses into the submodule. And therefore, the promised "more accurate matching [...] in the submodule" is never performed. And the commit adding the submodule is never pruned. Since I am not really familiar with all that tree diff code (and as a general rule to protect my mental health, I try my best to stay away from submodules, too), but you two are, may I ask you gentle people to have a closer look to fix those bugs? Thanks, Dscho
