Re: Fwd: Unexpected behavior of ls-files command when using --others --exclude-from, and a .gitignore file which resides in a subdirectory

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 24, 2024, 01:09 UTC
Message-ID: <20240124010924.GB2603087@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAGF1KhWaOrnV8d2f_vajOT0hFK2N_8m7-p_vnZhw92ZdhXfsag@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 06:40:10AM +0100, Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> > Do you get different results from that toy repo? If not, then what is
> > different about your main repo? Do you perhaps have a stray "*" match
> > somewhere in .git/info/exclude, etc? Or are you still providing
> > --exclude-from in addition to --exclude-standard?
> 
> The difference lies in how I deal in my computer with ignored files. I
> have some files in all my repos which have to be ignored always, so I
> have that pattern in my core.excludes file. BUT those files have to be
> backed up on my system, just in case my local copy of the repo is lost
> for some reason, as they are files I need for development in my
> personal machine.
> 
> If I use --exclude-standard, no matter if those files are being
> ignored by core.excludes OR .git/info/exclude, they won't appear in
> that 'list other files' command output.

Ah, OK. I understand your case better now. Then yes, I think --exclude-per-directory is the right thing for you, since it lets you just trigger parts of the exclusion mechanism, and not all. I would say to ignore the deprecation mention in the manpage. ;)

(I think this also gives an interesting use case arguing for continuing to support those more-specific exclusion options for ls-files).

If you are mostly just using core.excludesFile (and not .git/info/exclude), then I suspect:

  git -c core.excludesFile /dev/null ls-files -o --exclude-standard

would work for you, too (but it sounds like you might also be using .git/info/exclude).

-Peff