From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:41:50 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Clarified documentation of --exclude-per-directory.
Message-ID: <20060926214150.GB8177@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v3baftdp0.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
> Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> writes:
> 
> > Tommi Virtanen noted on #git today that
> >
> >   git ls-files --exclude-per-directory
> >
> > doesn't appear to work as advertised by the documentation unless
> > --others is also used.  According to the current source code this
> > is the case as the --exclude-per-directory file isn't read unless
> > we are iterating over the working directory, which only happens
> > with --others.
> 
> I am puzzled by this problem description.
> 
> If we _were_ to read --exclude-per-directory file when we are
> not doing --others, what better behaviour would we get out of
> the command?
 
From what I was able to gather on #git Tommi was trying to do:

	mkdir foo ; cd foo ; git init-db
	echo foo >foo
	echo foo >ignore
	git add foo ignore
	git commit -a -m create
	rm *
	git ls-files --exclude-per-directory=ignore \
		| git checkout-index

and not see "foo" come back into the working directory.  I don't
know what circumstances lead him to want to create an exclude file
pattern on a per-directory basis for use with checkout-index but
that seems to be what he was trying to do.


I don't really see a problem with applying --exclude-per-directory
all of time (like we apply --exclude=.git/info/exclude all of
time), its just not what the code does today.  I just personally
don't need that and don't have the time to fix ls-files to do so.
So I took the shorter approach and updated the documentation. :)

-- 
Shawn.