Re: git 2.34.0: Behavior of `**` in gitignore is different from previous versions.

On 11/18/2021 12:04 PM, Jeff King wrote:

On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 08:11:04PM +0330, Danial Alihosseini wrote:

quoted

What did you do before the bug happened? (Steps to reproduce your issue)
Consider the following project structure
- data
  - data1
    - file1
    - file1.txt
  - data2
    - file2
    - file2.txt
- .gitignore


`.gitignore` is as follows:

data/**
!data/**/
!data/**/*.txt

What did you expect to happen? (Expected behavior)

I expect all files in `data` folder to be ignored except `.txt` files.

What happened instead? (Actual behavior)

`file1` and `file2` are not ignored.
Here is the `check-ignore` output:

$ git check-ignore -v data/data1/file1
.gitignore:2:!/data/**/ data/data1/file1

Thanks for an easy reproduction. It looks like this changed in
f6526728f9 (dir: select directories correctly, 2021-09-24). Author cc'd.

Thanks for the bisect and CC.

The key thing seems to be that the second line of your .gitignore should
match only directories (because of the trailing slash), but no longer
does.

Doesn't "matching only directories" mean it would match everything
within that directory? (It also means that "data/file" is not matched,
which is still correct.)

My interpretation of these patterns is that everything in data/data1/
and data/data2/ should not be ignored, making it seem like the change
fixed a bug (it definitely changed behavior).

Just for extra clarity, this test currently passes:

test_expect_success 'directories and ** matches' '
	cat >.gitignore <<-\EOF &&
	data/**
	!data/**/
	!data/**/*.txt
	EOF
	git check-ignore file \
		data/file data/data1/file1 data/data1/file1.txt \
		data/data2/file2 data/data2/file2.txt >actual &&
	cat >expect <<-\EOF &&
	data/file
	EOF
	test_cmp expect actual
'

but the previous behavior would have passed this test:

test_expect_success 'directories and ** matches' '
	cat >.gitignore <<-\EOF &&
	data/**
	!data/**/
	!data/**/*.txt
	EOF
	git check-ignore file \
		data/file data/data1/file1.txt \
		data/data2/file2.txt >actual &&
	cat >expect <<-\EOF &&
	data/file
	EOF
	test_cmp expect actual
'

I seek more clarity on this. Specifically: if we match a directory
then should we not also match the contents within?

Thanks,
-Stolee