Re: refining .gitignores

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Nov 15, 2007, 21:56 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.9999.0711151349560.4260@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20071115211727.GC3552@steel.home>

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Alex Riesen wrote:

> 
> No, I honestly believed that Git-known files can be ignored. According
> to Linus I must be wrong, but I have an excuse:

I do think we're not necessarily entirely consistent wrt ignore files.

In particular, git-ls-files itself actually is pretty special, because it has two totally different modes:

 - you can ask for "other" files (and this is where you'd be expected to 
   use .gitignore)

 - you can just list the files git knows about (and this is where you'd 
   generally be expected to *not* use .gitignore)

..and to make matters more interesting, "git add" used to do the former (it was just a thin script around "git-ls-files -o") but then was later enhanced to also take already-known files into account, so I am not at all surprised if we actually get confused because we used to have a fairly clear separation of the two cases but then we started mixing them up.

So while I think that ".gitignore" *should* only affect files that we don't already know about (ie effectively only file lists that come from "readdir()", not from internal git data structures), I would not be at all surprised if there are bugs.

		Linus