Re: Git / Subversion Interoperability

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mar 24, 2007, 20:13 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0703241258560.6730@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070324185517.GA10876@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>

On Sat, 24 Mar 2007, Karl Hasselström wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> There is a slight problem with directly converting between svn:ignore
> and .gitignore, though: the semantics are only almost the same.
> Specifically, git's ignore patters are recursive (applies to
> subdirectories) while subversion's are not. But it's not a big
> problem.

You should be able to use an "absolute" path-name to ignore something in .gitignore, in which case it is not used recursively.

So if your .gitignore looks like

*.o

it means that it recursively ignores all *.o files starting at that level.

HOWEVER, if you write it as

	/*.o

it means that it ignores *.o files only *within* that level (so it's "absolute" wrt the particular .gitignore file, not globally).

So you can have both behaviours.

[ I think the exact behaviour is: if there is a '/' anywhere in the name, 
  it's not a recursive match and has to match the file exactly, but 
  somebody like Junio should probably back me up on that ]

		Linus