Re: Ignore pattern with trailing whitespace in .gitignore is void using git 1.8.1.5

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 9, 2013, 06:28 UTC
Message-ID: <7va9qdf5o9.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vehfpf8kk.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Thor Andreas Rognan <thor.rognan@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Maybe I'm doing it wrong, or maybe it's the intended behaviour,
>> but I find that a trailing whitespace after a pattern in .gitignore
>> makes the pattern void with git 1.8.1.5.
>
> I doubt we do anything clever like that.
> ...
> The user tells to ignore anything followed by a dot followed by a
> lowercase Oh followed by a SP.  We ignore "hello. ", but not "hello.o"
> nor "hello.o  " (two SPs at the end), just as told.

Of course, having said all that, I do not think anybody objects too deeply against a patch that change the behaviour to ignore trailing whitespaces, as long as the patch leaves an escape hatch to allow people who do want to specify a pattern that matches with pathnames with trailing whitespaces. Without thinking it through, perhaps

	echo '*.o\ ' >.gitignore

or something?

Technically speaking, such a change is a regression, but I doubt that many people would mind it too much.