Re: [RFC/PATCH] git-add: Don't exclude explicitly-specified tracked files

quoted

Currently, 'git add' will complain about excluded files, even if they
are already tracked:

This is not exactly true:

$ echo '*.pdf' > .gitignore; touch foo.pdf; git add -f foo.pdf
$ echo content >> foo.pdf; git add foo.pdf

Here, the second "git add" didn't need the -f flag.

So, your problem is not about already-tracked exclude files, but it is
about already-tracked files in an excluded directory.

Good catch.  My commit message is definitely wrong.

quoted

This commit changes 'git add' to disregard excludes for tracked files
whose paths are explicitly specified on the command-line.

I don't think you need this to solve the problem, and as Junio said,
that would make "git add dir/*" add all the ignored files, which would
make -f essentially useless.

I respectfully disagree with this assessment, however.

First of all, as you point out 'git add foo.pdf' works where foo.pdf
has been explicitly ignored, while in contrast 'git add dir/file'
fails when file has only been indirectly ignored because it is in an
ignored directory.  In the former case, the user explicitly specified
a policy for that file.  In the later case, the policy is only
indirectly expressed because that file happens to be in an ignored
directory; in my and Ævar's use cases what we mean is "I only care
about a few files in a big directory and don't feel like writing out a
.gitignore entry for each one".  So it doesn't make sense to me to
allow the user to add the file in the first place (whether by a 'git
add foo.pdf' or a 'git add f*') but not the second.  Perhaps the
answer is to swing in the opposite direction of this patch series and
make 'git add foo.pdf' fail as well, but I must ask what we'd be
defending against... it seems the only reason is to allow the user to
maintain local changes to a tracked file, but as I've stated many
other tools don't seem to similarly respect the .gitignore.

Secondly, I don't think this makes '-f' useless.  '-f' would still be
used to initially add an untracked file to the index.  So this would
maintain an invariant that no ignored files are tracked unless the
user has specified a '-f' for it in the past.

Incidentally, I noticed that 'git add dir/file' for ignored dir worked
fine in an older version of git.  'git bisect' reveals that the
behavior I would like to change was introduced in 29209cb.  From the
commit message, I get the sense that this particular behavior was not
actually intentional (someone please correct me if I'm missing
something).

Thanks,

Greg