Re: [PATCH] check-ignore: clarify treatment of tracked files

2 messages, 2 authors, 2016-06-15 · open the first message on its own page

Re: [PATCH] check-ignore: clarify treatment of tracked files

From: Junio C Hamano <hidden>
Date: 2016-06-15 23:03:12

Michael J Gruber [off-list ref] writes:
By default, check-ignore does not list tracked files at all since
they are not subject to ignore patterns.

Make this clearer in the man page.

Reported-by: Guilherme <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Michael J Gruber <redacted>
---
That really is a bit confusing. Does this help?
Thanks.

"git check-ignore" is a tool to debug your .gitignore settings when
your expectation does not match the reality, so having this new
sentence here is a good thing to do, but I wonder if there is a more
prominent and central place where people learn about the ignore
mechanism the first place.  If we had this sentence there, too, that
may reduce the need to debug their .gitignore settings in the first
place.

Perhaps Documentation/gitignore.txt?  Documentation/user-manual.txt?

quoted hunk
 Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt | 3 +++
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
diff --git a/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt b/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt
index ee2e091..788a011 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-check-ignore.txt
@@ -21,6 +21,9 @@ the exclude mechanism) that decides if the pathname is excluded or
 included.  Later patterns within a file take precedence over earlier
 ones.
 
+By default, tracked files are not shown at all since they are not
+subject to exclude rules; but see `--no-index'.
+
 OPTIONS
 -------
 -q, --quiet::

Re: [PATCH] check-ignore: clarify treatment of tracked files

From: Michael J Gruber <hidden>
Date: 2016-06-15 23:03:14

Junio C Hamano schrieb am 04.12.2014 um 21:15:
Michael J Gruber [off-list ref] writes:
quoted
By default, check-ignore does not list tracked files at all since
they are not subject to ignore patterns.

Make this clearer in the man page.

Reported-by: Guilherme <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Michael J Gruber <redacted>
---
That really is a bit confusing. Does this help?
Thanks.

"git check-ignore" is a tool to debug your .gitignore settings when
your expectation does not match the reality, so having this new
sentence here is a good thing to do, but I wonder if there is a more
prominent and central place where people learn about the ignore
mechanism the first place.  If we had this sentence there, too, that
may reduce the need to debug their .gitignore settings in the first
place.

Perhaps Documentation/gitignore.txt?  Documentation/user-manual.txt?
gitignore.txt has

DESCRIPTION
       A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git
should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the
       NOTES below for details.

I doesn't get any clearer. But then the notes read:

NOTES
       The purpose of gitignore files is to ensure that certain files
not tracked by Git remain untracked.

       To ignore uncommitted changes in a file that is already tracked,
use git update-index --assume-unchanged.

       To stop tracking a file that is currently tracked, use git rm
--cached.

That is again clear for our case (line 1), but line 2 is troublesome,
isn't it?

user-manual mainly refers to gitignore. So I guess it's good, but that
line about assume-unchanged doesn't quite match with the discussion in
another current thread.

Michael
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