Proposal: major release to adopt forward slash, same as node-glob?

[erikkemperman]

As folks have pointed out before, minimatch misbehaves somewhat on Windows -- and it ends up sabotaging the documented usage of node-glob, i.e. to "Please only use forward-slashes in glob expressions".

In the spirit of constructive feedback, I figured I'd submit a PR. The first commit adds Appveyor CI configuration, and causes a bunch of failed tests.

The second removes the substitution of platform-specific path separator -- the assumption being that the caller follows the convention of only using forward-slashes.

Needless to say this would be a breaking change.

Related:
#92
#78
#64
#103
isaacs/node-glob#212

[erikkemperman]

Aargh, apologies, closed the wrong PR. Reopening.

[litmit]

It's wrong. On Windows '/' character in pattern should match both '/' and '\' characters in file paths. There is not ideal slow implementation (i think this should be done in matching engine) but it work.

[erikkemperman]

I disagree. The idea here is to have a cross-platform API, with forward slash as path separator and backward slash as escape. That way you can still match literal forward (on Windows) and backward slashes by escaping them in the pattern.

[litmit]

Pattern (as some kind of special language) SHOULD be cross-platform, and therefore need to use one special character (forward slash) as path separator on all platforms.
But, in opposite, file path is platform depended by definition .
For example, code:
if ( minimatch(filepath, 'foo/*.js') ) { /* do something*/ }
will perfectly works with current minimatch version (or with my fork) on all platforms.
But with your commit the condition will do never trigger on Windows.

Moreover, imagine that one day will be invented a new operation system, and it developers decide to use pipe characted ('|') as path separator. The code example will work on this OS without any changes, because filepath foo|bar.js will be internally replaced with foo/bar.js (using code that you try to remove) and successfully match to the pattern foo/*.js

[litmit]

See also https://github.com/litmit/minimatch/tree/match-for-windows (works on Windows just enough for me).
But I'm converting only slashes in paths not patterns.

[AmeliaBR]

Has this proposal been superseded by micromatch/nanomatch@4d25ac8, or is it still being considered?

Has there been any discussion about making this a configurable option, with three possible values:

• allow only '/' as a separator in paths and patterns, a \ is treated as a regular character (Strict behavior)
• allow either / or \ to be a separator, and treat them as interchangeable when matching (Windows behavior)
• match the current platform default (probably a sensible default, approximating current behavior, but more consistently)

---

FYI, I'm using Metalsmith, which uses minimatch heavily in the core library and its plugin ecosystem. On Windows systems, they do not normalize paths at all, instead relying on the Node core Path methods, which use platform-dependent separators.

But of course, I want my code to also work when a colleague runs it on a Unix system, so my patterns all use / as a separator. Right now (minimatch 3.0.4), I find that regular matching works, but the Regex returned by makeRe don't.

[litmit]

@AmeliaBR there is should be one valid option :)

• allow only '/' as a separator in patterns, and any separators that allowed by the platform in the file paths.

[AmeliaBR]

@litmit

On reflection, I do agree that only / should be allowed in patterns, to avoid ambiguity.

But I'd still like the option of controlling what this matches to, depending on whether I'm doing path normalization before calling the library.

[litmit]

@AmeliaBR
If / match to any valid platfom specific path separator then you need no care on whether you are doing path normalization before calling the library. It will match in any case.

The option that you suggested is needed, IMHO, in two rare cases:

• when the glob matching library used to match anything aside from the filepaths;
• when need to match to the flile path that came from a different OS.

[isaacs]

Done on v5