From: alex@bellandwhistle.net
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:36:56 GMT
Subject: Re: gitignore vs. exclude vs assume-unchanged?
Message-ID: <4dd8389939fbf3dc77b58adcca7b17c1@bellandwhistle.net>
In-Reply-To: <20140416234555.GA4309@google.com>

On 2014-04-16 16:45, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> alex@bellandwhistle.net wrote:
> 
>> In particular, 'exclude' is spottily documented.
> 
> Where did you expect to read about it?  I see some mention of
> .git/info/exclude in the gitignore(5) page, but I wouldn't be
> surprised if there's room for improvement there (improvements
> welcome).

I suppose I might consider amending the opening sentence at:

http://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

from:

"A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git 
should ignore."

to something that makes the point earlier about the similarity:

"Both gitignore and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude files specify intentionally 
untracked files that Git should ignore."

or:

"Like the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file, gitignore files specify 
intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore. The difference is 
that files matched by a pattern in a gitignore file will be untracked 
for all users of the repository."

or somesuch.

The other thing is that there is no warning in the docs that 
assume-unchanged is not an absolute promise to ignore. This is news to 
me. I don't see this anywhere. I understand now that the use case is 
performance, but that could be clearer.

thanks again
Alex