Re: What's the use case for committing both the freshly created file and it's exclusion in .gitignore?

From: Bartosz Konikiewicz <izdwuut@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 10, 2018, 10:19 UTC
Message-ID: <CAAdU=LuXh6jo+pDPE-tisd_SoMhGjGL6kvm6X91Qsz1-XYD0wA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180810011249.GA82458@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>

On 9 August 2018 at 21:58, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> If you are asking as a more general case: why do we not complain about
> .gitignore for files the index already knows about, then I think that is
> useful. It lets you override the .gitignore _once_ when adding the file
> initially, and then you don't have to deal with it again (and keep in
> mind that the pattern excluding it may be broad, like "*.o", or even
> just "*", so simply deleting it from the .gitignore is not an option).

This totally makes sense to me. Thanks for your explaination!

On 10 August 2018 at 03:12, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

> "git help gitignore" has some notes about this.

Thanks! I wasn't aware of this. For some peculiar reason it didn't strike me that the most appropriate place to look for .gitignore-related stuff is - lo and behold - .gitignore manual page. I was looking for clarification on 'git add' page, which I didn't find informative enough in that aspect.

> If you have ideas
> about moments in interactive use where we could print some messages to
> make the behavior less surprising, that would be very welcome.

Sure I do! I have came up with two ideas which I believe that can be combined:

1.

Show 10 quoted lines

>            staged     unstaged path
>   1:    unchanged        +1/-0 .gitignore !
>   2:        +0/-0      nothing excluded.txt
>
> ! Not ignoring yet untracked files.
>
> *** Commands ***
>   1: status       2: update       3: revert       4: add untracked
>   5: patch        6: diff         7: quit         8: help
> What now>

Here I propose to add an exclamation mark next to a .gitignore file and reference it below. I am also thinking about marking files that .gitignore affects. I think that any special character would be appropriate. If I may only suggest, I wouldn't choose an asterisk (*) because it's already used when a '2: update' option is chosen.

2.

Show 11 quoted lines

>            staged     unstaged path
>   1:    unchanged        +1/-0 .gitignore
>   2:        +0/-0      nothing excluded.txt
>
> *** Commands ***
>   1: status       2: update       3: revert       4: add untracked
>   5: patch        6: diff         7: quit         8: help
> What now> q
> You are about to add new files that are excluded in .gitignore. Confirm y/n?
> What now>y
> Bye.

Here I ask the user to confirm that he is about to stage yet untracked files. Then I cheer him up with Git built-in courtesy.