Am 13.08.2017 um 06:53 schrieb David Adam:

Hi all,

I think I have a bug in git (tested 2.11.0 on Debian 8, 2.14.1 on OS X and
2.14.1.145.gb3622a4 on OS X).

Given a repository with an export-ignore directive for a subdirectory in
.gitattributes, `git archive` with a pathspec that excludes a different
subdirectory produces no output file and git exits with -1 as the return
status.

As shown:

    > git init foo && cd foo
    Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/david/src/foo/.git/
    > mkdir a b
    > touch {a,b}/somefile
    > echo "/a export-ignore" >> .gitattributes
    > git add .
    > git commit -m "Initial commit"
    [master (root-commit) 53527a7] Initial commit
     3 files changed, 1 insertion(+)
     create mode 100644 .gitattributes
     create mode 100644 a/somefile
     create mode 100644 b/somefile
    > git archive --verbose master ':(top)' ':(exclude)b*'
    .gitattributes
    > echo $?
    255

If this is intended behaviour, is there any way of achieving the goal of
excluding a subdirectory not listed as export-ignore? Using the exclude
pathspec ":(exclude)b" produces an empty subdirectory b in the output,
which I would like to avoid.

This is a reduced testcase; my goal is to end up with two archives, one
containing directory b only, and one containing everything except for
directory b - so I can't just add 'b export-ignore' to gitattributes.

Thanks for the thoughtful bug report!

The problem seems to be that archive.c::write_archive_entry() returns 0
instead of READ_TREE_RECURSIVE for directories with the attribute
"export-ignore", and archive.c::write_directory() gets caught by
surprise by that and returns -1, which ends up causing git archive to
exit with return code 255 without actually writing anything.

This should only happen if you use wildcards like "*", i.e. git archive
should behave as expected if you spell out the full name of the
directory.  Can you confirm that?

The real solution is probably to teach tree-walk.c::do_match() how to
handle attributes and then inject ":(attr:-export-ignore)" as a default
internal pathspec in archive.c::parse_pathspec_arg() instead of handling
it in archive.c::write_archive_entry().

@Duy: What do you think?

Thanks,
René