Re: Cogito and --exclude vs --exclude-per-directory

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 16, 2005, 19:01 UTC
Message-ID: <7vd5l08li9.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20051116093630.GA2783@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>

Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> [Note: this experiment was done with git 0.99.9g and Cogito 0.15.1, so ]
>
> It seems that --exclude patterns always take precedence over
> --exclude-per-directory patterns.
>
> Is this the intended behavior?

Yes, we had a lengthy discussion on this before ls-files acquired the exclude patterns.

Documentation/git-ls-files.txt "Exclude Patterns" summarizes the precedence rule, and it was done that way to allow command line users to override what are in individual per-directory pattern files per-invocation basis. That is, --exclude-per-directory is to store project defaults, and --exclude is for end-users to specify override per-invocation. --exclude-from has the lowest precedence to give overall default. The example in the documetation has a a good illustration.

	* --exclude-from contains '*.[oa]' to catch generic
          "uninteresting" files.

	* --exclude-per-directory files contain patterns to
          catch files that are built by the Makefile in the
          directory.

        * --exclude specifies whatever the user feels like for
          the particular invocation.

If I were writing a Porcelain, I would probably install default exclude list in /usr/lib/MyPorcelain/exclude file and point at the file with --exclude-from. I may also be tempted to check $HOME/.MyPorcelain/exclude file and add it to give defaults per user, but I do not do Porcelains, so...