negated list in .gitignore no fun

I discovered git is so negative: it has very good .gitignore negative matching facilities, but not as good positive matching facilities. (Maybe positive glob lists are merely fed to git-add from the command line.)

I had dreams of tracking only a few files in a large tree. I thought I would maintain that list as a negated list in .gitignore, and then always use "git-add ." to keep git's index reflecting my list.

However that's just not possible.

# head -n 5 .gitignore * !X11/xorg.conf !anacrontab !apt/apt.conf.d/10jidanni !apt/sources.list # git-add . But git-status only shows anacrontab got added. None of the files in the subdirectories get added. We continue, # sed -n s/^!//p .gitignore|xargs git-add #no help! # sed -n s/^!//p .gitignore|xargs -n 1 git-add #Geez. Finally worked. OK, I suppose my next step is just to rm .gitignore and just add any future files I want to add to my list one by one with git-add... like git was designed to do in the first place. OK, thanks. Bye. Next episode: some kind of middle ground with etckeeper.