From: Danial Alihosseini <danial.alihosseini@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2021 17:06:04 GMT
Subject: Re: git 2.34.0: Behavior of `**` in gitignore is different from previous versions.
Message-ID: <CACLOEFb41ZLvvkaF6xivFShOJfSHcNupzstiShKHiNCg4DCEhQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <72fffbff-16f7-fa17-b212-67aae9e1b034@gmail.com>

Thanks Derrick.

> 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