negated list in .gitignore no fun

I discovered git is so negative: it has very good .gitignore negative matching facilities, but not as good positive matching facilities. (Maybe positive glob lists are merely fed to git-add from the command line.)

I had dreams of tracking only a few files in a large tree. I thought I would maintain that list as a negated list in .gitignore, and then always use "git-add ." to keep git's index reflecting my list.

However that's just not possible.

# head -n 5 .gitignore * !X11/xorg.conf !anacrontab !apt/apt.conf.d/10jidanni !apt/sources.list # git-add . But git-status only shows anacrontab got added. None of the files in the subdirectories get added. We continue, # sed -n s/^!//p .gitignore|xargs git-add #no help! # sed -n s/^!//p .gitignore|xargs -n 1 git-add #Geez. Finally worked. OK, I suppose my next step is just to rm .gitignore and just add any future files I want to add to my list one by one with git-add... like git was designed to do in the first place. OK, thanks. Bye. Next episode: some kind of middle ground with etckeeper.

On Thursday 2008 December 18 15:53:23 jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

That's by design. You've chosen to ignore those directories; they match "*" themselves. Thus, 'git add .' doesn't descend into them looking for files.

I wouldn't want to change this behavior because I'll often use a "build" directory and put all generated files in it and just ignore that directory with a single line in .gitignore.

I think the .gitignore you really want is: * !X11 !X11/xorg.conf !anacrontab !apt !apt/apt.conf.d !apt/apt.conf.d/10jidanni !apt/sources.list [...]

But, I haven't tested that.

On Fri, 19 Dec 2008, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

Yeah, the problem is that the '*' matches the subdirectories (like "X11"), but the negative matching does not. So the subdirectory gets ignored, and as a result, git won't even traverse into it and notice that there's a file in there that shouldn't be ignored.

It's actually logical, but not what you want.

So you have several possibilities:

 (a) either create a .gitignore that looks like this:

	*
	!X11
	!X11/xorg.conf
	!anacrontab
	!apt
	!apt/apt.conf.d
	!apt/apt.conf.d/10jidanni
	!apt/sources.list

    which should work around it by telling git that it shouldn't ignore 
    the subdirectories.

 (b) realize that ".gitignore" only matters for files that git doesn't 
     already know about, so if you only want to track a small set of 
     files, what you _should_ do is just do a .gitignore that looks like 
     this:

	*

     and then just force-add the few files you want to track, using 
     something like

	git add -f X11/xorg.conf anacrontab apt/apt.conf.d/10jidanni apt/sources.list

     and now you're done - git won't ignore them, since explciitly you 
     told git to track them.

 (c) Try to teach git to not ignore subdirectories leading up to 
     non-ignored files, and give you the .gitignore semantics you like. I 
     suspect it's not worth it, because the git behaviour is logical once 
     you know about it and understand it.

.. and possibly other things you could do too.

			Linus

On Thu, 18 Dec 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Oh, you should have a '/' there in the subdirectory marker too, because otherwise a file like 'X11/apt' would now match as a positive match.

.. and because of subtle issues like this - negated entries are really quite complex enough as-is. Don't use them for anything subtle, you _will_ get them wrong regardless.

			Linus