Re: [PATCH] Make !pattern in .gitattributes non-fatal

Thomas Rast [off-list ref] writes:

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Thomas Rast [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Before 82dce99 (attr: more matching optimizations from .gitignore,
2012-10-15), .gitattributes did not have any special treatment of a
leading '!'.  The docs, however, always said

  The rules how the pattern matches paths are the same as in
  `.gitignore` files; see linkgit:gitignore[5].

By those rules, leading '!' means pattern negation.  So 82dce99
correctly determined that this kind of line makes no sense and should
be disallowed.

However, users who actually had a rule for files starting with a '!'
are in a bad position: before 82dce99 '!' matched that literal
character, so it is conceivable that users have .gitattributes with
such lines in them.  After 82dce99 the unescaped version was
disallowed in such a way that git outright refuses to run(!) most
commands in the presence of such a .gitattributes.  It therefore
becomes very hard to fix, let alone work with, such repositories.

Fixing the working tree is easy, but when we read from a history
that already records such an entry in an attribute file, it would
become somewhat cumbersome.  I wouldn't use "very hard to fix" to
describe such a case.

Well, I'm sorry if I hurt any feelings there, but...

  ~/tmp/badattr(master)$ git show bad:.gitattributes
  !bad text
  ~/tmp/badattr(master)$ ~/g/git-checkout bad  # a git without my patch
  fatal: Negative patterns are forbidden in git attributes
  Use '\!' for literal leading exclamation.
  ~/tmp/badattr(master)$ git status
  # On branch master
  nothing to commit (use -u to show untracked files)

Notice how it remains on master.  I suppose with enough knowledge of the
internals I could manage,...

That would have been nicer to have in the log message.

In any case, 1.8.1.5 will go out with this fix (this is v1.8.1
regression IIUC) this afternoon.  Thanks for a fix.