Re: Git 1.7.6: Sparse checkouts do not work with directory exclusions

----- Original Message -----
From: Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy
Date: 9/20/2011 4:09 AM

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 8:03 AM, Joshua Jensen
[off-list ref]  wrote:

quoted

Sometime after Git 1.7.3.2, sparse checkouts stopped working for me.  My
sparse-checkout file looks something like:

*
!DirA/
!DirB/
DirC/

Confirmed. It got me wonder why the negated pattern tests did not
catch this. Turns out this works:

/*
!DirA/
!DirB/
DirC

This is my theory why yours does not work: negated patterns !DirA and
!DirB excludes both directories, but git still descends in them
because you may have other patterns that re-include parts of
DirA/DirB, for example:

DirA/DirD
!DirA

When it's in DirA/DirB, "*" tells git to match everything (equivalent
"DirA/*" and "DirB/*"), so it matches all entries in DirA/DirB again,
essentially reverting "!DirA" and "!DirB" effects.

By using "/*" instead of "*", we tell git to just match entries at top
level, not all levels.

I think it makes sense, but it's a bit tricky.

I can confirm this fix works for me, but it is certainly tricky.  IMO, 
it should either be documented or some kind of fix should be added to a 
future version of Git to allow * by itself to work again.

quoted

and describe why those lines were removed?

Quotes from 9e08273: "The commit provided a workaround for matching
directories in index. But it is no longer needed."

Yeah, I saw that, but it made little sense to me, especially since it 
seems to break a behavior that worked before.

Thanks!

Josh