Re: How do I qualify paths in the .gitignore file w.r.t. the repo root directory?

From: Sitaram Chamarty <sitaramc@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 26, 2009, 01:23 UTC
Message-ID: <slrngqbrpd.t1k.sitaramc@sitaramc.homelinux.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vvdqyyzsr.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On 2009-02-25, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> Sitaram Chamarty <sitaramc@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

>> I can use this.  Can we keep it in the same section, despite
>> being technically not a '_how_'?  It fits the other sections
>> even less, and the sectioning is the main thing in all this.
>
> I thought making the text easier to follow was the main thing.

I meant the sectioning was the main change to make the text easier to follow, since the words are mostly the same otherwise.

> Sectioning could be part of the solution, but if we find that the boundary
> between sections are blurry, or if there are too many sections compared to
> the number of rules, perhaps dividing them into sections and giving each a
> separate section header may make them even harder to follow.

I'm ambivalent on this, so I appreciate the tie-breaker.

> I am actually very tempted to say that the correct description of the
> gitignore language is:

I see you've used 'pattern' and 'sign' to break the overloading of '/'.

Show 9 quoted lines

>     - an optional ! sign whose meaning is "unignore paths that matches
>       this pattern, instead of ignoring them"; followed by
>
>     - an optional / sign whose meaning is "a match with this pattern must
>       be made at this directory and not in its subdirectories"; followed
>       by
>
>     - a pattern that never begins nor ends with a slash whose meaning is
>       "this is a shell glob pattern to test paths against"; followed by

I wish[1]. But in reality, a slash 'inside' anchors the match the same as a leading slash does.

Boy this is tough :-) and I'm almost tempted to relook at my first attempt, where your only concerns were the words 'otherwise' and 'anywhere else' for non-native speakers.

I'll think about this some more and get back to you.

Regards,

Sitaram

[1] Would have been much simpler, plus you'd be able to specify a non-anchored pattern that contains a slash, which you currently cannot.