Re: .gitignore Bug Report on the behavior of *

From: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>
Date: Sep 25, 2010, 20:03 UTC
Message-ID: <201009252203.48820.j6t@kdbg.org>
In-Reply-To: <201009251923.o8PJNJYE031841@no.baka.org>

On Samstag, 25. September 2010, Seth Robertson wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> # Properly shows X and B/XX as untracked, as I expected
> echo X > X; echo XX > B/XX; git status
>
> # I expected B/XX to show up as untracked
> rm -f .gitignore B/.gitignore
> echo '*' > .gitignore; echo '!*' > B/.gitignore; git status

You should update your expectations to match what you got. ;-)

To show why your expectations are wrong, consider a *huge* and *deep* directory with thousands and thousands of subdirectories, call it "usr", that should be ignored. The .gitignore at the top-level would just say:

  /usr

Do you really expect git to walk down this ignored directory, just to make double-sure that really, really down there does nowhere exist a .gitignore that says "oh, wait, don't ignore *this* file"?

-- Hannes