Re: Interpretation of '/' changed sparse-checkout

Caleb Marchent <cmarchent <at> aminocom.com> writes:

Corrected cut-paste errors on first submission, seems I missed a bunch of terminating '/' when hand-copying the text in from the sparse-checkout files :-( Sorry.

I have a system where I checkout by default everything except one directory. Then the rules in the top-level sources can selectivly reintroduce subdirectories as required for the build target. I have deployed, using git 1.7.2.5, a set of git trees which use the following sparse-checkout rules to achieve this.

/ !exclude/ exclude/reinclude/

I have however discovered that if the reincluded directory is the same as the 
first part of any other path then that path will also be checked out.
 
/
!exlcude/
exclude/wanted/

 
will checkout both:

exclude/wanted/ exclude/wanted_not/

This appears to have bee fixed in git 1.7.10.2 but from that version of git 
onwards using '/' to request everything and then exclude a specific directory 
from it no longer works.
 
While I have been able to contrive the same effect with recent versions of git 
using the following updated sparse-checkout rules
 
/*
!exclude/
exclude/reinclude/

 
Even with this work-around there are two problems:

1) If I have a path: exclude/reinclude/exclude, this will now be exluded where 
I would expect it to be included as it was with 1.7.2.5
 
2) I have a large number of deployed trees across a number of machines that 
have the existing format which will break when git operations are performed 
after a upgrade to the latest git.
 
I believe that the interpretation of '/' should be 'everything in the repo', 
from which later rules can exclude. I think this is a bug in recent versions 
of git. I have been working on some ideas for a fix to the git code based along 
these lines. Can anyone confirm if my analysis is correct or provide an 
alternate solution?
 
Also I would like to know if anyone knows the solution to point 1) above as 
this also blocks upgrading to the latest version of git.