Re: Excluding files from git-diff

From: Christian Jaeger <christian@pflanze.mine.nu>
Date: Oct 17, 2008, 16:30 UTC
Message-ID: <48F8BDA7.50901@pflanze.mine.nu>
In-Reply-To: <48F8ACC2.1010903@drmicha.warpmail.net>

Michael J Gruber wrote:

> your .gitignore probably doesn't change that often,
> so that it shouldn't show up in the diff after that anyways. Or put it
> in .git/info/excludes.

For me, adding entries to that file does not make "git diff" or "gitk" or even "git ls-files" ignore files matching the entries. Only "git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude" will exclude them. And "git diff " and gitk don't seem to know the --exclude-from option.

Is there a way to really invert the patterns given to "git diff" or alike? I.e. instead of saying "git diff -- * .somedotfile .someothernongitignoredotfile" one could just say something like "git diff --invert-matches -- .gitignore"? And even better, could one configure some such so that it has effect on all tools by default?

(That would help working around the clutter problem from the "Separating generated files?" thread; i.e. in some cases this could be good enough to not require splitting a project into multiple repositories. (Although I'm all the same currently working on a "intergit-find-matching-commit-in" script, since there may be more good reasons than only the clutter to split projects.))

Christian.