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why does "man git-clean" not mention files ignored by core.excludesFile?

Subject: why does "man git-clean" not mention files ignored by core.excludesFile?

## tl;dr

2 messages between May 21, 2018 and May 22, 2018.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

Robert P. J. Day· May 21, 2018, 16:24 UTC · lore
  sort of related to my previous post, but in "man git-clean", one
reads:
  -e <pattern>, --exclude=<pattern>
     In addition to those found in .gitignore (per directory)
     and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, also consider these patterns to
     be in the set of the ignore rules in effect.
  -x
     Don’t use the standard ignore rules read from .gitignore
     (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, but do still use
     the ignore rules given with -e options. This allows
     removing all untracked files, including build products.
     This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git reset)
     to create a pristine working directory to test a clean
     build.
  why is there no mention of files ignored via a user's
core.excludesFile configuration? those sections seem sufficiently
comprehensive to list all of the other ways to ignore files, is there
a reason that that config setting is not mentioned?
rday
Junio C Hamano· May 22, 2018, 02:50 UTC · re: Robert P. J. Day · lore

Re: why does "man git-clean" not mention files ignored by core.excludesFile?

"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca> writes:
>   why is there no mention of files ignored via a user's
> core.excludesFile configuration?

IIUC, core.excludesFile is a much much later invention made long after everybody lost interest in updating "git clean", let alone its documentation. The support for the configuration variable was added to the internal API used to access exclude mechanism, so "clean", together with other users of the same API, got it for free when it was added, and nobody bothered to update the documentation of "clean".

In other words, a short answer is because you haven't made it to mention it ;-).

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