From: Jonathan Gossage <jgossage@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:41:01 GMT
Subject: Newbie .gitignore problem
Message-ID: <AANLkTin=BwgjqWQ3NfNdL9a1fUnVnFMrmAsmnZjHS=gL@mail.gmail.com>

I am having a problem specifying .gitignore filters properly
I have a directory structure as follows:

          repo-root
               |
               -------------------------------------------------------------------
               |                    |
           |
              dir1               dir2  (symlink)
             dir3
                                    |
                ---------------------------------------------------
               |                                                   |
          many directories and files                  dir4

My problem is that I want to exclude all files and sub-directories in dir2
except for dir4 from control by Git.
I tried a number of variations on the following .gitignore file in dir2 but
either everything was excluded or everything was included. I tested using
git add -uall -n

The final .gitignore file was
*
*/*
!dir4


How should I go about tackling this. The .gitignore man pages were
unclear to me.

Jonathan Gossage