Feature Request: gitignore recursion

I'm hoping to get the following feature implemented into git.

Add the ability to recursively include using: !/my_dir/**/*

Currently, in order to include a directory with multiple sub-directories within a excluded directory, you must do the following: !/my_dir/ !/my_dir/* !/my_dir/*/* !/my_dir/*/*/* !/my_dir/*/*/*/* !/my_dir/*/*/*/*/*

Here is a use case: When developing a WordPress site you typically only place the wp-content/themes directory under version control. Once you start adding custom plugins, README files, and a task manager like Grunt JS, you then have to starting getting creative with your .gitignore if your .git directory is in the web root directory.

Here is an example: https://gist.github.com/AJ-Acevedo/6859779

Thanks for taking the time to consider this feature AJ

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 5:23 AM, AJ <alljeep@gmail.com> wrote:

You can do that since v1.8.2. Actually the pattern should be

!/my_dir/**

Checkout gitignore man page for more information.

On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 05:26:17PM +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

I think that is a reasonable approach to doing what the OP wants.

However, one thing I expected to work but didn't is:

  echo '*' >.gitignore
  echo '!*' >my_dir/.gitignore

That _does_ work for attributes, like:

  echo '* foo=one' >.gitattributes
  echo '* foo=two' >my_dir/.gitattributes

where the more-specific file takes precedence. It works because we keep an attribute stack, and look from most-specific directory to least.

The directory traversal code, however, tries to avoid entering directories that are ignored. So if you have told it to ignore "my_dir", we will not even look at "my_dir/.gitignore".

This is arguably a bug, as the documentation says that more specific paths should take precedence over toplevel ones. But the optimization of pruning ignored paths is very important for performance; otherwise, we would end up enumerating entire ignored subdirectories on the off chance that they have a negative .gitignore entry buried deep inside them.

So I don't think it is worth fixing, but it might be worth mentioning in the documentation. Or is it mentioned somewhere that I missed?

-Peff

On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 07:24:11AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Yeah. I'm still bugged about that because we could at least make your case work (deep/down/.gitignore will never ever, of course) but I probably won't do anything about it for the next few months. So how about this.

The first use of footnote:[] is already in git-notes.txt. The second instance should not cause any issues with supported asciidoc versions.

-- 8< --
Subject: [PATCH] gitignore.txt: note about a behavior not so obvious much to users

Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
---
 Documentation/gitignore.txt | 5 ++++-
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

Note that this doesn't work either:

  echo '*' >.gitignore
  echo '!my_dir/*' >>.gitignore

The problem isn't that git doesn't read 'my_dir/.gitignore'. Git simply doesn't recurse into excluded directories, so patterns on excluded content have no effect.

IMO this behavior is reasonable, as there is no way to check whether a negative pattern will match within an excluded untracked directory without scanning the directory.

What about this instead?

--- 8< ---
Subject: [PATCH] gitignore.txt: clarify recursive nature of excluded directories

Additionally, precedence of negated patterns is exactly as outlined in the description, we don't need to repeat this.

Signed-off-by: Karsten Blees <blees@dcon.de>
---
 Documentation/gitignore.txt | 5 +++--
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 09:59:38AM +0200, Karsten Blees wrote:

Good point. To make it work you need to un-ignore the subdir, like:

  *
  !my_dir/

at which point "!my_dir/*" will work. But then so will a child .gitignore in subdir. In fact, I think the only reason that "!my_dir/**" is needed in the first place is that the "*" is too over-reaching; it ignores both the top-level directories _and_ all of the individual files in included directories.

So I think the best solution for the original problem, which is to ignore everything except for a particular directory, is:

  # ignore everything at the top-level...
  /*
  # ...but specifically include one directory
  !/my_dir/

and then we do not even need to use "**" matching at all (which was really about overriding the over-reaching "*").

Right. I was focused on not reading the .gitignore, but not descending into the ignore subdir affects patterns we already know about, too.

Yeah, I think your update improves things.

I wonder if it is worth adding the "exclude everything except one directory" case above to the EXAMPLES section, too.

-Peff

Another solution to include just one specific directory:

  /*
  !/wp-content
  /wp-content/*
  !/wp-content/themes

Note the "/*", instead of "*" which matches everything everywhere.

The compiled version reads like this:

"A trailing "/" matches everything inside. For example, "abc/" matches all files inside directory "abc"..."

--- 8< ---
Subject: [PATCH] gitignore.txt: fix documentation of "**" patterns

"**" means bold in ASCIIDOC, so we need to escape it.

Signed-off-by: Karsten Blees <blees@dcon.de>
---
 Documentation/gitignore.txt | 6 +++---
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)