Re: [RFC] extending git-ls-files --exclude.

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Jul 28, 2005, 15:52 UTC
Message-ID: <20050728155210.GA17952@pasky.ji.cz>
In-Reply-To: <7vd5p73jlu.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

  Hello,

  after skimming through it, I think I completely like what you have
shown here. I'm only concerned about this:

Dear diary, on Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 12:49:33AM CEST, I got a letter where Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> told me that...

Show 5 quoted lines

>     $ cat Documentation/.gitignore
>     # ignore generated html files,
>     # except foo.html which is maintained by hand
>     !foo.html
>     *.html

  I think this is wrong, and my brief experiments confirm that. I think
that the actually useful semantics of exclusion would be for
_subsequent_ exclusions, not preliminary ones. You generally don't say
"I never want this ignored, but I want the rest of that ignored", but
"I want that ignored, except this". This also gives you more
flexibility:

	*.html
	!f*.html
	fo*.html

would ignore *.html and fo*.html, but not any other f*.html filenames. But more importantly,

	.gitignore: *.txt
	Documentation/.gitignore: !*.txt

will not work, which was the whole _point_ of the exclusion.

Could we please have this semantics changed for those reasons?

Thanks,

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
If you want the holes in your knowledge showing up try teaching
someone.  -- Alan Cox