From: Eli Barzilay <eli@barzilay.org>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:10:00 GMT
Subject: `*' gitignores and nested ignores
Message-ID: <19851.6264.179471.935771@winooski.ccs.neu.edu>

According to the man page, a .gitignore file that is deeper has higher
precedence, and a `!' line overrides lower precedence ignores.  I
tried that, and it works in cases like the last "vmlinux*" example.

But it doesn't work if the lower precedence directory has a "*"
pattern.  If the last example from the man page is changed to:

               $ cat .gitignore
               *
               $ ls arch/foo/kernel/vm*
               arch/foo/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
               $ echo ´!/vmlinux*´ >arch/foo/kernel/.gitignore

then -- IIUC -- the second ignore should work the same, but it
doesn't.  This also happens if the first pattern is "/*".

Is this a bug?


BTW, my use case is to track random stuff in a directory that has lots
of junk.  I wanted to do this by having a toplevel "/*" ignore and add
files explicitly when I want to.  But there are some directories that
should be tracked, and I was trying to achieve this effect by adding a
"!/*" pattern in them.  Is there a more convenient (or saner) way of
doing this?

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!