From: Junio C Hamano Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:28:17 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] Make !pattern in .gitattributes non-fatal Message-ID: <7vfw0eg90e.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Thomas Rast writes: > Before 82dce99 (attr: more matching optimizations from .gitignore, > 2012-10-15), .gitattributes did not have any special treatment of a > leading '!'. The docs, however, always said > > The rules how the pattern matches paths are the same as in > `.gitignore` files; see linkgit:gitignore[5]. > > By those rules, leading '!' means pattern negation. So 82dce99 > correctly determined that this kind of line makes no sense and should > be disallowed. > > However, users who actually had a rule for files starting with a '!' > are in a bad position: before 82dce99 '!' matched that literal > character, so it is conceivable that users have .gitattributes with > such lines in them. After 82dce99 the unescaped version was > disallowed in such a way that git outright refuses to run(!) most > commands in the presence of such a .gitattributes. It therefore > becomes very hard to fix, let alone work with, such repositories. Fixing the working tree is easy, but when we read from a history that already records such an entry in an attribute file, it would become somewhat cumbersome. I wouldn't use "very hard to fix" to describe such a case. But the demotion to warning does make sense; let's do that in v1.8.1.5.