/* in .gitignore

Hilco Wijbenga· Sep 25, 2012, 20:18 UTC · lore

Hi all,

If you add "/*" (or "*") to '.gitignore' Git will ignore '.gitignore'. This means that your '.gitignore' appears to work (which in fact it does) but really it will only work for you because your '.gitignore' will not be added to the repository. You have to override with an explicit "!/.gitignore" for it to work correctly. (Or use "git add -f .gitignore".)

Naturally, this behaviour makes perfect sense: "/*" means everything. Still, I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to make an exception for '.gitignore' itself? Then if somebody *really* wanted to ignore '.gitignore' they could add "/.gitignore" to '.gitignore'?

Cheers, Hilco

Junio C Hamano· Sep 25, 2012, 23:13 UTC · re: Hilco Wijbenga · lore

Re: /* in .gitignore

Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com> writes:

> Naturally, this behaviour makes perfect sense: "/*" means everything.
> Still, I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to make an
> exception for '.gitignore' itself? Then if somebody *really* wanted to
> ignore '.gitignore' they could add "/.gitignore" to '.gitignore'?

If somebody is sick enough to ignore "everything", he can add "/*" to the .gitignore file and in order to make sure he knows what he is doing and he is doing what he thinks is doing, he would check with "git diff --stat HEAD" etc. before committing, and double check with "git show --stat" etc. after committing.

".gitignore" (or ".gitattributes" for that matter) shouldn't be any different from your ordinary tracked contents. If you have "*.o" in the ignored pattern list, you would need an extra care to defeat the pattern to add vendor-supplied binary-only object file with "add -f" and live with the fact that a new vendor-supplied binary-only object file not appearing on untracked list. It is exactly the same deal.

Having said that, I guess you could add "!.git*" to your $GIT_DIR/info/exclude and see if it gives an improved user experience.

Hilco Wijbenga· Sep 26, 2012, 00:03 UTC · re: Junio C Hamano · lore

Re: /* in .gitignore

On 25 September 2012 16:13, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Naturally, this behaviour makes perfect sense: "/*" means everything.
>> Still, I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to make an
>> exception for '.gitignore' itself? Then if somebody *really* wanted to
>> ignore '.gitignore' they could add "/.gitignore" to '.gitignore'?
>
> If somebody is sick enough to ignore "everything", he can add "/*"
> to the .gitignore file and in order to make sure he knows what he is
> doing and he is doing what he thinks is doing, he would check with
> "git diff --stat HEAD" etc. before committing, and double check with
> "git show --stat" etc. after committing.

Ignoring everything is not quite so "sick". :-) My use case is Eclipse's .metadata directory. This directory is *huge* but only .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/*.prefs is really of interest (and not even all of those files). The subset of *.prefs that we are interested in will allow us to share Eclipse configuration settings (things like formatting settings and which warnings we care about). So I have several '.gitignore' files with "/*" + "!/some-dir/". [To make things even more interesting, the ".settings" directory should be ignored in all other places (so it's in our top level '.gitignore').]

I would be very happy to find out better ways to handle this particular scenario. I had quite a struggle getting it to work.

Show 6 quoted lines

> ".gitignore" (or ".gitattributes" for that matter) shouldn't be any
> different from your ordinary tracked contents.  If you have "*.o" in
> the ignored pattern list, you would need an extra care to defeat the
> pattern to add vendor-supplied binary-only object file with "add -f"
> and live with the fact that a new vendor-supplied binary-only object
> file not appearing on untracked list.  It is exactly the same deal.

I do not entirely agree. I think '.gitignore' *is* different. This file is special and affects Git's behaviour. And it does so *before* it has been committed. Or even added. The fact that '.gitignore' itself is not listed in the output of, e.g., "git status" is easy to miss.

I have not really used '.gitattributes' but I assume the same applies.

> Having said that, I guess you could add "!.git*" to your
> $GIT_DIR/info/exclude and see if it gives an improved user
> experience.

Mmm, that does not seem to help. I did

git init && touch file.txt && echo '/*'>.gitignore && echo '!.gitignore' >>.git/info/exclude && git status

it lists nothing (Git 1.7.12). I had expected to see '.gitignore'. Did I misunderstand you?

Even so, this would only improve *my* user experience, wouldn't it? This would not get pushed to the central repository so it would not help anyone else.