Gitignore documentation

Hello,

I was reading the gitignore documentation (https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore), especially the following paragraph:

         "If the pattern does not contain a slash /, Git treats it as
a shell glob pattern and checks for a match against the pathname
relative to the location of the .gitignore file (relative to the
toplevel of the work tree if not from a .gitignore file)."

From that paragraph I understand that if I have the following directory structure:

        .gitignore
        a
            f

(the root of the repository contains the file .gitignore and the folder a, while the file f is inside folder a) where the file .gitignore contains only the pattern f, when file "f" is tested whether it should be ignored or not, the pattern f in .gitignore is matched against the "pathname relative to the location of the .gitignore file" (which is a/f). Because "f" (the pattern) does not match "a/f" (the pathname relative to the location of .gitignore), the file "f" should not be ignored. However, if I test this scenario, git ignores the file (this behaviour is consistent with the examples from the rest of the documentation and other explanations on the internet).

I looked at the history of the "Documentation/gitignore.txt" file on the github repository and I saw that initially the paragraph looked like this:

        "If the pattern does not contain a slash '/', git treats it as
a shell glob pattern and checks for a match against the pathname
without leading directories."

This old version of the paragraph is consistent with git's current behaviour.

Then I saw the following commit https://github.com/git/git/commit/81c13fde379c46cad6b6e4a03ed7ee4f686c030f#diff-7fea460d44f92f185e7add8aa5620305, which changed that paragraph to the current version. However, I cannot see how the two wordings (the original one and the current one) are the same.

I would really appreciate if someone could explain how to read the current version of the paragraph such that it is consistent with git's behaviour.

Thank you, Razvan Maris

Maris Razvan <razvan.alex.maris@gmail.com> writes:

Thanks.

Jonathan, after re-reading 81c13fde ("gitignore.5: Clarify matching rules", 2010-03-05), I do not recall why we thought this part of the change was a good idea, either. Patterns with slash is anchored at one directory, and that directory is the one that has per-directory .gitignore file. Patterns without slash (including a pattern that ends with but otherwise has no other slash) are supposed to match at every level below the directory that the pattern is defined in.

 Documentation/gitignore.txt | 4 +---
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 3 deletions(-)

Hi,

Junio C Hamano wrote:

I had a sense of deja vu, and found https://public-inbox.org/git/20111107080926.GC30486@elie.hsd1.il.comcast.net/

Any idea what happened there? Would it be useful for me to rebase and revive that series?

Thanks, Jonathan

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

No idea what happend there.

Anyway, I quickly read them over and found nothing questionable, except perhaps the moving of "slash is dropped for the purpose of the remaining rules" in 1/4 were probably not a great idea (IOW, I found that it leaves a stronger impression to the readers to say it upfront in the paragraph), but I do not think it is a show-stopper.

Reviving the topic would indeed be a good idea.

Thanks.

On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 4:38 AM Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't remember what happened either. But yeah it's always good to improve this text.