Re: check-attr doesn't respect recursive definitions

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 2, 2013, 16:43 UTC
Message-ID: <7vhajog9xp.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130402163034.GA19252@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 09:11:02AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>> 
>> > Yes, it is the expected behavior, though I cannot offhand think of
>> > anything that would break if we did apply it recursively.
>> 
>> Conceptually that breaks our brain.  "All files in doc/ directories
>> are text" and "doc/ directory is text" are two different things, no?
>
> In some systems, yes, but git does not have any notion of "doc/" as an
> item (after all, we track content in files, not directories), so I do
> not see what it means to specify a directory except to say "everything
> under it has this property".

That was true back when gitattributes (and ignore) was defined to apply only to the paths we track. But export-ignore abuses the attrtibute system, allows a directory to be specified in the match pattern, and we declared that is a kosher use by the patch that caused 1.8.1.X regression, no? So "Git does not have any notion of "doc/' as an item" is no longer true, I think.