Re: Bug Report: .gitignore behavior is not matching in git clean and git status

From: Chris Johnson <chrisjohnson0@gmail.com>
Date: May 1, 2017, 01:56 UTC
Message-ID: <CABfTTAdQPGei6CZoHGJGUtKHdJ4eT822pzc=DATynfeaZ94gxA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq60hljqud.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Good assessment/understanding of the issue. git clean -n does not report anything as being targeted for removal, and git clean -f matches that behavior. I agree with it probably being related specifically to the -d flag.

As another experiment I modified .gitignore to ignore /A/B/C instead of /A/B/ and the same result occurs (-n reports nothing, -dn reports removing A/)

Lastly, I changed .gitignore to just be /A/, and in doing so, clean -dn stops reporting that it will remove A/. I’m not exactly sure if this last one is surprising or not.

Also, and sorry for the noise, but I did a reply-all here, but will a reply automatically include the rest of the list? Or was reply-all the right move?

On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 9:41 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 38 quoted lines

> Chris Johnson <chrisjohnson0@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I am a mailing list noob so I’m sorry if this is the wrong format or
>> the wrong please.
>>
>> Here’s the setup for the bug (I will call it a bug but I half expect
>> somebody to tell me I’m an idiot):
>>
>> git init
>> echo "/A/B/" > .gitignore
>
> You tell Git that anything in A/B/ are uninteresting.
>
>> git add .gitignore && git commit -m 'Add ignore'
>> mkdir -p A/B
>> touch A/B/C
>
> And create an uninteresting cruft.
>
>> git status
>
> And Git does not bug you about it.
>
>> git clean -dn
>
> This incorrectly reports "Would remove A/" and if you gave 'f'
> instead of 'n', it does remove A/, A/B, and A/B/C.
>
> Despite that "git clean --help" says 'only files unknown to Git are
> removed' (with an undefined term 'unknown to Git').  What it wants
> the term mean can be guessed by seeing 'if the -x option is
> specified, ignored files are also removed'---so 'unknown to Git'
> does not include what you told .gitignore that they are
> uninteresting.  IOW, Git knows they are not interesting.
>
> It looks like a bug in "git clean -d" to me.  Do you see the same
> issue if you use "git clean" without "-d"?  IOW, does it offer to
> remove A/B/C?