Re: check-attr doesn't respect recursive definitions

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 2, 2013, 16:51 UTC
Message-ID: <20130402165128.GA19712@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vhajog9xp.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 09:43:30AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> > In some systems, yes, but git does not have any notion of "doc/" as an
> > item (after all, we track content in files, not directories), so I do
> > not see what it means to specify a directory except to say "everything
> > under it has this property".
> 
> That was true back when gitattributes (and ignore) was defined to
> apply only to the paths we track.  But export-ignore abuses the
> attrtibute system, allows a directory to be specified in the match
> pattern, and we declared that is a kosher use by the patch that
> caused 1.8.1.X regression, no?  So "Git does not have any notion of
> "doc/' as an item" is no longer true, I think.

Yes, but as I explained later, the meaning of "apply an attribute to dir" in such cases is always equivalent to "apply attribute recursively to dir/*". So I do not think we are violating that rule to recursively apply all attributes.

But let's take a step back. I think Jan is trying to do a very reasonable thing: come up with the same set of paths that git-archive would. What's the best way to solve that? Recursive application of attributes is one way, but is there another way we could help with solving that?

Using:

  git ls-tree --name-only -zrt HEAD |
  git check-attr --stdin -z export-ignore

means we can find out that "foo/" is ignored. But he would have to manually post-process the output to see that "foo/bar" is below "foo". Not impossible, but I just wonder if git can be more helpful in figuring this out.

-Peff