Re: [PATCH] check-ignore: clarify treatment of tracked files

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 4, 2014, 20:15 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqzjb3rx1u.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <fbc5799c32357e8bff0c690ba7bc4cd46374684d.1417706481.git.git@drmicha.warpmail.net>

Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> By default, check-ignore does not list tracked files at all since
> they are not subject to ignore patterns.
>
> Make this clearer in the man page.
>
> Reported-by: Guilherme <guibufolo@gmail.com>
> Signed-off-by: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
> ---
> That really is a bit confusing. Does this help?

Thanks.

"git check-ignore" is a tool to debug your .gitignore settings when your expectation does not match the reality, so having this new sentence here is a good thing to do, but I wonder if there is a more prominent and central place where people learn about the ignore mechanism the first place. If we had this sentence there, too, that may reduce the need to debug their .gitignore settings in the first place.

Perhaps Documentation/gitignore.txt?  Documentation/user-manual.txt?

Show 18 quoted lines

>
>  Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt | 3 +++
>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt b/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt
> index ee2e091..788a011 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt
> @@ -21,6 +21,9 @@ the exclude mechanism) that decides if the pathname is excluded or
>  included.  Later patterns within a file take precedence over earlier
>  ones.
>  
> +By default, tracked files are not shown at all since they are not
> +subject to exclude rules; but see `--no-index'.
> +
>  OPTIONS
>  -------
>  -q, --quiet::