Re: 1.8.3 - gitignore not being parsed correctly on OS X; regex support is broken?

Misty De Meo <misty <at> brew.sh> writes:

Hi,

Gitignore parsing no longer seems to work properly in git 1.8.3.

One of my repositories has the following gitignore:

/*
!/.gitignore
!/Library/
!/CONTRIBUTING.md
!/README.md
!/SUPPORTERS.md
!/bin
/bin/*
!/bin/brew
!/share/man/man1/brew.1
.DS_Store
/Library/LinkedKegs
/Library/PinnedKegs
/Library/Taps
/Library/Formula/.gitignore

In 1.8.2.3 and earlier, this works as expected. However, in 1.8.3 I'm
seeing every file in /bin/ being marked as an untracked file.

I asked about this in #git, and was told that the culprit was the
regex support; apparently recompiling without regex support fixes the
specific gitignore issue. However, this doesn't seem to have been
reported anywhere on the mailing list that I can see. I was also told
that the issue is OS X-specific, and doesn't happen on other
platforms.

Thanks,
Misty De Meo

I see a similar problem using e.g. the following .gitignore to exclude
everything except C source files and header files:

    *
    !*/
    !*.c
    !*.h

In Git 1.8.3 'git status' will show other files as untracked while in
Git 1.8.2.3 I don't have that problem. I bisected to find that the
offending commit is v1.8.2.1-402-g95c6f27. 

I am not on OSX, however, but on Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 and RHEL 5.8) so
this may be a separate issue. I've also gotten the impression that this
is intentional. In any case I cannot create a .gitignore that achieves
the same for both older and newer versions of Git.

Best regards,
Øystein Walle