pathspec: don't error out on all-exclusionary pathspec patterns

Instead of erroring out and telling the user that they should add a
positive pattern that covers everything else, just _do_ that.

For commands where we honor the current cwd by default (ie grep, ls-files
etc), we make that default positive pathspec be the current working
directory.  And for commands that default to the whole project (ie diff,
log, etc), the default positive pathspec is the whole project.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>

Author: torvalds

Documentation/glossary-content.txt

@@ -387,7 +387,9 @@ Glob magic is incompatible with literal magic.
 exclude;;
 	After a path matches any non-exclude pathspec, it will be run
 	through all exclude pathspec (magic signature: `!` or its
-	synonym `^`). If it matches, the path is ignored.
+	synonym `^`). If it matches, the path is ignored.  When there
+	is no non-exclude pathspec, the exclusion is applied to the
+	result set as if invoked without any pathspec.
 --
 
 [[def_parent]]parent::

pathspec.c

@@ -522,7 +522,7 @@ void parse_pathspec(struct pathspec *pathspec,
 	}
 
 	pathspec->nr = n;
-	ALLOC_ARRAY(pathspec->items, n);
+	ALLOC_ARRAY(pathspec->items, n + 1);
 	item = pathspec->items;
 	prefixlen = prefix ? strlen(prefix) : 0;
 
@@ -546,10 +546,15 @@ void parse_pathspec(struct pathspec *pathspec,
 		pathspec->magic |= item[i].magic;
 	}
 
-	if (nr_exclude == n)
-		die(_("There is nothing to exclude from by :(exclude) patterns.\n"
-		      "Perhaps you forgot to add either ':/' or '.' ?"));
-
+	/*
+	 * If everything is an exclude pattern, add one positive pattern
+	 * that matches everyting. We allocated an extra one for this.
+	 */
+	if (nr_exclude == n) {
+		int plen = (!(flags & PATHSPEC_PREFER_CWD)) ? 0 : prefixlen;
+		init_pathspec_item(item + n, 0, prefix, plen, "");
+		pathspec->nr++;
+	}
 
 	if (pathspec->magic & PATHSPEC_MAXDEPTH) {
 		if (flags & PATHSPEC_KEEP_ORDER)

t/t6132-pathspec-exclude.sh

@@ -25,8 +25,10 @@ EOF
 	test_cmp expect actual
 '
 
-test_expect_success 'exclude only should error out' '
-	test_must_fail git log --oneline --format=%s -- ":(exclude)sub"
+test_expect_success 'exclude only no longer errors out' '
+	git log --oneline --format=%s -- . ":(exclude)sub" >expect &&
+	git log --oneline --format=%s -- ":(exclude)sub" >actual &&
+	test_cmp expect actual
 '
 
 test_expect_success 't_e_i() exclude sub' '