Git excludes fails to avoid git submodule warning

Working with Git 2.21.0 on Linux:

The git-add(1) man page says:

"The optional configuration variable core.excludesFile indicates a path to a file containing patterns of file names to exclude from git-add"

But if I do this:

$ echo "docs/themes/*/.git >> .gitexcludes
$ git config core.excludeFiles .gitexcludes
$ git add docs
 warning: adding embedded git repository: docs/themes/foo

It seems to me that this goes against what the git-add(1) man page says.

A workaround I found on stackoverflow is to add any file within the target directory:

$ git add docs/themes/foo/README

And then add everything:

$ git add docs

In which case the contents of .gitexcludes is honoured. But that seems like a hack.

Am I experiencing the intended result of Git's exclude function? If so, I'll happily submit a patch to the man page to clarify this behaviour. If not, I guess I'm submitting a bug report here.

Thanks for all the amazing work.

Cheers.

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 6:01 AM Klaatu <klaatu@member.fsf.org> wrote:

That's because you're not supposed to add files inside another repository. The "git add docs/theme/foo/README" should have failed.

This kind of sharing part of worktree between two repositories (the top dir and one in docs/themes/foo) has never been officiaily supported if I remember it correctly.