Re: Gitignore matching "git add" wildcard prevents operation

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 15, 2010, 15:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20100115154816.GA1579@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20100115153419.GA12982@vidovic>

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 04:34:19PM +0100, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> >   1. Most programs don't take their own globs. Without knowing that git
> >      can do so, there is no reason to discover it in this instance. I
> >      can see searching the manpage for options, but not for a discussion
> >      of globbing behavior.
> > 
> >   2. They would have to know that using a git-glob will magically change
> >      the error-checking behavior.
> 
> Not sure. This isn't a Git-particular issue.
> 
> Users may hit this with a lot of other unix tools (sed, grep, find,
> etc). So, we can expect either
>   they already know the issue;
> or
>   they are discovering it using Git.

I don't understand what you mean. How does "sed" do its own globbing of the command line?

> Most of the tools I talk about do have a manual section about globbing.
> Users could learn globs with Git too and expect the same behaviour
> somewhere else.

Sure. git-add(1) talks about globbing, too, and it even has a sentence that explains exactly what is happening in Marko's case:

   The git add command will not add ignored files by default. If any
   ignored files were explicitly specified on the command line, git add
   will fail with a list of ignored files. Ignored files reached by
   directory recursion or filename globbing performed by Git (quote your
   globs before the shell) will be silently ignored.

My complaint was more that as a user, I am not likely to see this problem and think "I'll bet git-specific globbing can solve it." And when I look in the manual, I am more likely to look for a command-line option that helps me rather than to read all of the text (though the fact that we specifically mention "ignore" in the same paragraph means that at least a user searching for "ignore" in the man page will come up with this paragraph).

-Peff