Re: .gitignore Bug Report on the behavior of *

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 25, 2010, 20:53 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinF2Bk0O96hPiB+WFzWAwEqu=wqdXEnM39+JOoN@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201009252203.48820.j6t@kdbg.org>

On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 20:03, Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org> wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Samstag, 25. September 2010, Seth Robertson wrote:
>> # Properly shows X and B/XX as untracked, as I expected
>> echo X > X; echo XX > B/XX; git status
>>
>> # I expected B/XX to show up as untracked
>> rm -f .gitignore B/.gitignore
>> echo '*' > .gitignore; echo '!*' > B/.gitignore; git status
>
> You should update your expectations to match what you got. ;-)
>
> To show why your expectations are wrong, consider a *huge* and *deep*
> directory with thousands and thousands of subdirectories, call it "usr", that
> should be ignored. The .gitignore at the top-level would just say:
>
>  /usr
>
> Do you really expect git to walk down this ignored directory, just to make
> double-sure that really, really down there does nowhere exist a .gitignore
> that says "oh, wait, don't ignore *this* file"?

That wouldn't be so expensive if the expectation that the .gitignore in /usr would only be considered if it had already been commited. Then we'd just have to check if we have a tree for /usr, and whether there's a gitignore there.

But doing this in the top-level .gitignore if possible is the best solution.