Re: [PROPOSAL] .gitignore syntax modification

On Oct 12, 2010, at 7:40 PM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Kevin Ballard wrote:

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On Oct 12, 2010, at 7:24 PM, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

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Special case "**/" (also "path/to/**/") is probably good enough. You
might need to handle all combinations of "**/" and other optimizations
in excluded_from_list() though. Can you make a patch (or a few
patches) for it?

[...]

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                                                                At
this point I'm actually in favor of simply assuming all paths that
don't start with / can be matched at any level

As a long-term change with early warnings and proper deprecation
procedure that may (or may not) be an ok idea, but in the short
term it is certainly a no-go.

If linux-2.6 is any indication of what to expect, some projects are
not using / in front of any paths with / at all.

Another possibility is using this new behavior for core.excludesfile and possibly .git/info/exclude, but not for patterns in .gitignore files. The benefit here is any existing project that uses .gitignore files will be unchanged, but global (and possibly repo-wide) patterns can benefit from the new behavior. The drawback is this would introduce a behavioral difference for patterns depending on which file they're in, which is probably not acceptable.

I will look into how much work is required to support **/ patterns without doing a wholesale replacement of fnmatch(). Hopefully it won't be infeasible.

-Kevin Ballard