Bug in .gitignore handling

For reasons too upsetting to explain, I have to keep a collection of symlinks inside my tree but outside of git's control, such as

mydir/foo -> ../otherdir/foo

To stop git clean from removing it, I added "foo" to .gitignore

The problem is that I foo appears in build paths inside the tree that I would like git clean to pick up, however the pattern "foo" is applied generally and matches stuff like

mydir/mousetrap/foo/objs

According to the man page, I should be able to change .gitignore to "foo/" to stop it from looking recursively, but that doesn't work, as now git clean -n -f -d wants to remove mydir/foo but not mydir/foo/objs

My desperate attempts "./foo" and "^foo" also didn't work. Please note that this is a vastly simplified version of the real problem, so I can't just use "!mousetrap/foo".

It seems "foo/" _should_ work even though foo isn't a directory.

Thanks Tommy