From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:47:12 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] clean: new option --exclude-from
Message-ID: <20151202164712.GA16636@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqlh9c6byy.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 08:40:05AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> But for this particular one, I viewed the topic as adding a new
> option as a shorter way for passing multiple -e <pattern> options on
> the command line.  When viewed that way, even if core.excludesfile
> were multi-valued, I wouldn't have imagined that people would try to
> use that mechanism for such a purpose--for one thing, the precedence
> order is wrong for that purpose, isn't it?

Good point. I didn't think about precedence at all.

I perhaps shouldn't have brought up core.excludesfile as all. I only
meant it as "you maybe can hack your way through to this without adding
any code".

I think a real option to do git-wide excludes would probably be more
like:

  git --exclude-from=/path/to/file clean ...

and that in turn would probably set GIT_EXCLUDE_FROM to a
colon-separated list of paths (or similar) so that sub-processes would
respect it, too.

On the other hand, one could make the same argument about the existing
"-e". You cannot do:

  git add --exclude='*.o' .

right now. So maybe "clean" is really the only place where people care
about such ad-hoc exclusion. Or maybe this an opportunity to add:

  git --exclude='*.o' clean

I dunno. I cannot think of a time when I would have used any of those
options myself.

-Peff