Re: check-attr doesn't respect recursive definitions

On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 09:43:30AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

In some systems, yes, but git does not have any notion of "doc/" as an
item (after all, we track content in files, not directories), so I do
not see what it means to specify a directory except to say "everything
under it has this property".

That was true back when gitattributes (and ignore) was defined to
apply only to the paths we track.  But export-ignore abuses the
attrtibute system, allows a directory to be specified in the match
pattern, and we declared that is a kosher use by the patch that
caused 1.8.1.X regression, no?  So "Git does not have any notion of
"doc/' as an item" is no longer true, I think.

Yes, but as I explained later, the meaning of "apply an attribute to
dir" in such cases is always equivalent to "apply attribute
recursively to dir/*". So I do not think we are violating that rule to
recursively apply all attributes.

But let's take a step back. I think Jan is trying to do a very
reasonable thing: come up with the same set of paths that git-archive
would. What's the best way to solve that? Recursive application of
attributes is one way, but is there another way we could help with
solving that?

Using:

  git ls-tree --name-only -zrt HEAD |
  git check-attr --stdin -z export-ignore

means we can find out that "foo/" is ignored. But he would have to
manually post-process the output to see that "foo/bar" is below "foo".
Not impossible, but I just wonder if git can be more helpful in figuring
this out.

-Peff