Re: .gitignore sub-dir exclusions not overriding '*'

From: Phil Pennock <phil-gitml@phil.spodhuis.org>
Date: Nov 19, 2014, 23:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20141119234136.GA53731@tower.spodhuis.org>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8BHvucnEAW065OXOe5NBQkxp7+8HJb7XCGYgOa=pkxLVA@mail.gmail.com>

On 2014-11-19 at 16:48 +0700, Duy Nguyen wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Phil Pennock
> <phil-gitml@phil.spodhuis.org> wrote:
> > Expected to work as .gitignore in top-level of repo:
> >
> >     *
> >     !**/*.asc
> >     !.gitignore
> >
> 
> gitignore man page has this "It is not possible to re-include a file
> if a parent directory of that file is excluded". In this case,
> directory "foo" is ignored by "*". Although it makes sense for this
> particular case to re-include something in foo because we can clearly
> see there are rules to re-include. It's on my todo list, but I don't
> know when it will be implemented.

Thanks for this and the patches and discussion which follow.

I didn't cover it in my report, but one of the scenarios I tried was to explicitly re-include directories, to make them candidates again, and either use directory-matching patterns in the top-level .gitignore or to use per-directory .gitignore to handle those directories.

Looking fresh today, I see that I failed to compare baseline behaviour without a .gitignore when using `git status` as a baseline for comparison. So a .gitignore like this:

    *
    !*/
    !*.asc

appeared to not work; even within the `foo/` sub-directory, `git status` shows no candidates for inclusion. But this is true even without a .gitignore. *sigh*

In fact, it looks like the simple three lines above work, without any .gitignore in sub-directories.

The behaviour which confused me between this simplified test-case and the original was that `git status` shows files in the top-level directory which are untracked, and in untracked files sub-directories where some other file in that directory is already tracked, but if no file in the sub-directory is already tracked, then `git status` does not report the files for inclusion, even if the cwd is inside that directory.

I tied myself in knots trying to avoid adding unencrypted files to the repo.

Thanks, -Phil