Re: git 2.34.0: Behavior of `**` in gitignore is different from previous versions.

From: Danial Alihosseini <danial.alihosseini@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 19, 2021, 17:06 UTC
Message-ID: <CACLOEFb41ZLvvkaF6xivFShOJfSHcNupzstiShKHiNCg4DCEhQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <72fffbff-16f7-fa17-b212-67aae9e1b034@gmail.com>

Thanks Derrick.

Show 6 quoted lines

> What is unclear to me is what exactly "match a directory" means.
> If we ignore a directory, then we ignore everything inside it (until
> another pattern says we should care about it), but the converse
> should also hold: if we have a pattern like "!data/**/", then that
> should mean "include everything inside data/<A>/ where <A> is any
> directory name".

I think if we consider directory and files separately, it would be more clear. If a pattern in gitignore matches a directory, it is just about that directory and not about its contents. The contents are ignored by another rule which states:

> It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of that file is excluded.

In our test case, the "data1" directory is ignored by the "data/**" pattern. However, the contents are ignored by two rules. One of them is that the parent ("data1") is not tracked. Another one is that the "data/**" pattern matches them. By adding the "!data/**/" pattern, the "data1" directory is re-included, but its contents are still ignored by the "data/**" pattern.

I hope this will help to make the rules more clear.

Thanks Danial